


across the river in jersey. (everything is legal in new jersey)

by lifetimeoflaughter



Series: counterparts. (alternatively, through the looking glass) [1]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ms. Marvel (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Arab Character, Arab Damian Wayne, BAMF Cassandra Cain, Batfamily Dynamics (DCU), Cassandra Cain is Black Bat, Crossover, DC Comics Rebirth, DC/Marvel crossover, Damian Wayne Has a Heart, Damian Wayne Needs a Hug, Damian Wayne is Robin, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Duke Thomas is Signal, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Good Sibling Duke Thomas, Gotham City is Terrible, Humor, Hurt Tim Drake, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Jason Todd is So Done, Kamala Khan is an Avenger, Marvel 616 Compliant, Marvel Cinematic Universe References, Muslim Character, New Jersey, Police Officer Dick Grayson, Post-Spyral, Protective Dick Grayson, Sibling Love, Stephanie Brown Needs a Hug, Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Tim Drake is Not Robin, Tim Drake is Red Robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 46,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24198901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifetimeoflaughter/pseuds/lifetimeoflaughter
Summary: Gotham City and Jersey City both exist in the state of New Jersey, right? So it wouldn't be too far out to think that the magnificent Ms. Marvel would eventually come across the Bat-Family (or at least some of its' members).
Series: counterparts. (alternatively, through the looking glass) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1962808
Comments: 118
Kudos: 177





	1. Dick

**Author's Note:**

> hi! for the sake of this extremely haphazard crossover, assume that the Avengers just coexist with the League - they don't interact much, but they are both aware of each other's existence. New York is shared territory for both the Titans and the Avengers, but Jersey City is the 616's Jersey City. Gotham/Star/Metropolis and all the other made-up cities do exist, and each of them have their respective superheroes, like normal.  
> enjoy!
> 
> *title taken from Blow Us All Away - Hamilton

Dick’s case takes him to Jersey City. It’s a bit far, almost in New York, so he takes his car instead of the motorcycle. The drive is nice, the balmy April air floating in through the rolled-down window and the clouds flitting over the full moon. The sky seems to get less red as he moves away from Gotham, and not for the first time, he wonders if Gotham exists on the edges of reality, like some strange mirage or demonic illusion; he would be more surprised if it wasn’t. He'd just been going home for the weekend and Amy had apologized profusely when she called him at three in the afternoon on a Friday asking him to go chase a lead upstate, but he hadn't minded. A road trip is a road trip, after all. 

Jersey City is one of the nicer cities in New Jersey. To anyone else, it looks like your average city; cars, streets, buildings, petty crime, fast-food joints, people drinking too much coffee, but to Dick, it feels like a breath of fresh air. It's been ages since he's been anywhere but the hellholes that are Bludhaven and Gotham. It's nice, he thinks absently, to be in a place where you don't need a back-up gas mask in case your first gas mask fails, or be in danger of being crushed by a monstrous casino owner or have to break up yet another squabble between Robin and Red Robin over comms. 

He parks his car outside a small motel and checks in. He’s here on Bludhaven P.D.’s dime, so the motel’s not as nice as it could’ve been. But still, it’s better than he was expecting. The room is clean, if small, and the bathroom has minimal rusting on the taps. It’s warm, too, and the blankets are thick and fluffy. He decides that maybe he won’t go out as Nightwing tonight; it’s been a long drive, and he’s booked in for a couple of days at least. If nothing of interest occurs in the daytime tomorrow, he’d go out tomorrow night.

He gives up on this decision ten minutes into flipping through the channels on the little TV.

* * *

Jersey City seems quiet, but from the looks of things, there’d been some major property damage not too long ago. There’s scaffolding along some of the buildings around a little store, and he can see the effect of a sizable force impacted on the ground in places. As he swings quietly from shadow to shadow, he racks his brain to remember any news pertaining to Jersey City in recent times; he’s not the most avid newspaper reader, but he figures if something big went down here he’d remember. An earthquake, perhaps? Maybe some kind of building collapse, or a major traffic accident.

The sky is a darkening purple, the clouds getting thicker as the night wears on. He finds himself at the waterfront, crouched on the roof of a nearby apartment building and he watches the moonlight sparkle on the Hudson, the waves ebbing and flowing with the tide. The breeze is pleasant, and he’s actually enjoying himself here. It’s...it’s very relaxing, in a way. He feels at peace in a way that he hasn’t felt in a long time. Maybe he should bring Tim here - heaven knew that kid needed to unwind. Seriously. Tim took on more responsibilities than Dick had in his actual adult life, and the kid was only seventeen. Between the Teen Titans, Batman’s surveillance tasks, Wayne Enterprises, and college applications, Tim was going to work himself into an early grave ( _pleasepleasenotagainno_ ) and Dick would not stand for it. Besides, it had been ages since they hung out, as big brother and little brother, and he knows Tim would like that.

Nothing interesting happening in drowsy little Jersey City, he sighs. Might as well swing back to the motel and catch some shut-eye before heading out in the morning. He pauses for a second, taking in the view, and that when he hears the - _KABOOM!_

He whips around and spots a cloud of smoke rising in this distance over a small building a few streets north of his current position. He shoots his grapple and makes for the scene, each swing heightening his adrenaline levels further. Building to building, duck and roll, shoot line, repeat. He’s almost there when out of the corner of his eye he spots someone stepping - _over?!_ the orderly rows of buildings to reach the site of the explosion. 

He gets there and lands on a nearby apartment building to case the scene before rushing in. There’s some shattered glass on the street - presumably from the store that was blown up. It seems to be some sort of diversionary tactic gone wrong, the bomb set off from inside the store, and now the store’s going up in flames. There’s people scrambling out, but the whine of the siren is still too far away and there’s civilians trapped in this oversized bonfire. He can’t stand back and watch, not when he could be helping - so it’s time to act. He draws a breath and takes a running leap off the building. The wind rushes past his face as he tucks neatly into a roll and lands on the street right in front of the store, superhero-style. Arms crossed over his face in a futile attempt to avoid the smoke, he runs in, the heat from the flames making the kevlar-lycra blend of his suit stick uncomfortably to his skin. 

The smoke forces its way up his nostrils and down his throat, leaving an acrid taste in his mouth and making his brain fuzzy. _Focus, Nightwing, focus._ He can hear the panicked shriek of a woman from the back of the store, and he makes his way towards her voice, eyes squinting against the brilliant yellow blaze, the mask lenses only helping minimally. Something breaks and he almost gets hit by a piece of flaming wood, but he dodges it at the last second. Nevertheless, he persists, and he can almost see her, her shape silhouetted by the flickering light around him, and he tries to yell a reassurance. 

“Don’t panic, ma’am! I’ve got you! Just -” he stops dead in his tracks as he finally reaches her, kneeling to try and examine the situation. She’s stopped screeching, and she’s only whimpering now, tears making their way down her frightened face as she hyperventilates.

Her arm’s bent in a way that makes him want to retch and her legs are trapped under a pile of rubble, wooden beams from the ceiling and bricks from the wall. Right. He’s gotta move those beams if he wants to get her to the paramedics outside, so here goes nothing.

The smoke’s getting to him; his lungs protest in the form of a hacking cough and he can feel the headache building behind his eyes. The soot’s clinging to his face, the sweat making tracks as it drips down from his hair. He drags an arm across his eyes and kneels next to the beams, grabbing one by the end and _heave_ and _push_ and he’s almost-almost got it vertical, just one more shove, and- 

Suddenly the beam gets a lot lighter and his momentum almost makes him topple onto the woman’s already destroyed legs, but he catches himself before he does. There’s a giant...hand? lifting the beam, and he watches, dumbfounded as another giant hand sweeps away the bricks and lifts the remaining pieces of wood, because it’s a _giant hand_ , and he almost doesn’t register the girl’s voice yelling to “-get her OUT of here, dude!” 

Her voice snaps him back to the situation, and he leans down and scoops up the battered woman’s form in his arms, and runs for the exit. He’s out in ten seconds, swaying on his feet as the medics push a gurney towards him, and the second he places her on the white mattress, he sinks to his knees, palms flat on the road as he tries to focus. _Deep breaths, Robin._

When he finally manages to clear his head, he realises that there’s a kindly-looking paramedic kneeling in front of him, a gentle hand on his shoulder. She looks young, her face concerned and her straight brown hair tied back in a severe ponytail under her hat. She helps him up and hands him a water bottle, and as he’s cracking it open he remembers that voice in the store and he turns to her, eyes wide.

“I have to go back! There’s a girl in there, she helped me get that woman free holy- I have to help her, I-” he cuts off, his throat burning. 

“She’ll be fine, trust me.” The woman seems unbothered, and Dick is horrified because that was a girl in there, couldn’t have been more than a teenager! -and almost like she’s reading his mind, she says, “That kid’s seen a lot worse, eh? I used to worry too, but she’s strong. A little smoke and flame won’t do anything to that girl, nah.” 

“Wait - so she is a kid - and you’re not worried?” He’s aware that he sounds a tad hypocritical, what with him setting the precedent for child heroes since way-back-when, but even he remembers the level of concern every officer and civilian displayed for Robin’s safety, no matter how contemptuously they regarded Batman. The woman raises an eyebrow and rests her hands on her hips, looking bemused. “You must be new in town, eh? That in there is Jersey City’s favourite daughter. She’s some kind of shapeshifter, and she’s good at what she does. Hell, I think the only time she’s actually been hurt was when she first showed up on the scene- gunman caught her in the side with a bullet, but she came back no problem the next night. A fire like this isn’t a problem, not for her, no.”

Dick must still look a little in shock, so the paramedic gently knocks her elbow against his, and looks at her wristwatch. “And she’ll be out in three, two...-” a shape appears in the doorway, with the same gigantic hands, each holding a person and depositing them gently on the sidewalk. Her hands shrink back down to size, and she wipes her brow. “-one,” finishes the woman. “Told ya,” she says, smiling over her shoulder as she walks to move the girl away from the blaze and hand her some water as the firefighters finally arrive. 

If he’s being honest, Dick’s a little dumbfounded. He wasn’t aware that Jersey City had metas, let alone teenage ones. He can’t begrudge her for trying to help, though - but where’s her mentor? Sure, Dick had started young, but he had had Batman and like, a TON of kevlar. Wally had Barry, Donna had Diana, Roy had Oliver, even Garth had Arthur, but who did this kid have?

Maybe he should just...ask her. 

“Hey,” he says, giving her a little wave-salute as he walks over to where she’s sitting on the back of an ambulance, sipping on a bottle of water and cleaning the soot off her face with a wet wipe. She looks up, surprised.

“Hi,” she says, her voice slightly suspicious. “You’re the guy from earlier, right? The one who rescued that lady over there?” She points to the woman he’d carried out, now being loaded into an ambulance. 

He crosses his arms over his chest and nods. “Yeah, that was me. Thanks for the assist, by the way,” he adds, resisting the urge to say “ _where are your parents, kiddo?”_ Instead, he nods at the space next to her. “Mind if I sit?”

She scoots to the side and lets him settle, and reaches behind her, scrabbling for something. “Wet wipe?” she asks, holding out a packet. “You got a little...something, on your face. You can take two - it’s a _lot_ of something,” she says, bringing up her free hand to her mouth to hide a giggle. Dick smiles back because it’s impossible not to. The girl is cheerful (and thankfully unharmed from the ordeal) but this is still new territory. It’s unlikely that she poses a threat of any kind, but Dick knows better than to take people for what they appear to be. 

“Thanks,” he replies, taking a wipe. He cleans off his face and she watches him curiously. She’s wearing a mask, if it can be called that; it doesn’t have lenses and her eyes are wholly visible behind it. Her uniform is - well, if he’s being honest, it looks pretty comfy. A blue tunic emblazoned with a yellow lightning bolt, red sleeves and tights, plus blue boots. The only problem he saw with it was the red scarf, because the sheer length of it would be a disadvantage in a fight and possibly a hazard in a fire, but she seemed at ease with it. Her skin tone reminded him of Damian; if he had to guess, he’d say that she was probably of Asian descent - Arab, or Indian, perhaps. Her verbal register was much more like Stephanie’s - they would probably get along really well, actually. 

The set of gold bracelets on her one arm clink as she brushes some stray knots out of her loose hair, eyeing him carefully, still looking cheerful. “You’re Nightwing,” she says. It’s not a question, just a statement of fact. “What’re you doing all the way in Jersey City? Don’t you work with Batman in Gotham?” 

Sure, she sounded like Steph, but the calculating look on her face was all Tim. _When did I start comparing everyone to the kids,_ he sighs internally. She’s still waiting for an answer, so Dick decides to play it safe. 

“I was in the mood for a little vacation, you know- seeing the sights and sounds of the big city,” he smirks, wiggling his fingers at their surroundings. That gets him an incredulous look, and he grins as she throws her head back and laughs herself hoarse. “Oh, oh man,” she says, wiping the tears from her eyes, “you are SUCH a dork, dude!”

Dick raises an eyebrow in mock offense. “I think you’ve known me long enough to call me a dork, little lady. Back home in Gotham, I’m considered uber-cool and they all think I’m wa-a-ay groovy and _totally_ tubular-” he’s interrupted by the girl’s howl of laughter, and he makes out a stuttered “oh _myGO-_ ” between her wheezing. She almost laughs herself off the ambulance and he has to grab her by the arm and pull her back to make sure she doesn’t crack her head open on the asphalt. 

She’s still dabbing at her eyes with her scarf five minutes later, when she holds out her hand and says, “I’m Ms. Marvel. Nice to meet you, Mr, uh, Nightwing. Welcome to Jersey City.”

He shakes her hand, and he can’t help but panic a little, because aw, shoot, he’s just found another kid to worry about. Well, in for a penny, right?

* * *

Ms. Marvel takes him to her favourite fast-food place because apparently “these, right here, Mr. Nightwing, are the _best_ gyros in all of New Jersey, ask anyone.” This best-gyro-status may also apply because Ms. Marvel gets said gyros for free, but he’s not about to turn down an offer of friendship and free food, especially not when the kid asked so nicely. According to her, the owner always gives her meals "on the house" because she saved him from a group of thugs once. She tells this story as the aforementioned owner takes their order, and when she finishes her story she smiles at him, earning her a fond ruffle of her hair from him.

Sitting in front of him, Ms. Marvel looks even younger. She’s absolutely demolishing her own plate, and a little laugh escapes him as he can’t help but compare her to Cass post-patrol. “What?” she says, pausing mid-bite to look at him with an expression like a wounded puppy. “-M hungry! Safin’ peopl’s hard wofk!” Her voice is indignant around the food in her mouth, and he can’t help snorting at her pout. “I- It’s- It’s just,” he tries valiantly, endeavouring not to chuckle, “you remind me of my sister.” 

Ms. Marvel snorts. “She eaf's like a horse afwer' hero-work too?”

Dick shrugs. “She eats like a horse all the time. It’s kind of endearing, actually.”

The kid stops to consider this. “Bet I couf’ bea’ her in a pie-eafin’ compefiftion” she says, the last couple of syllables muddled by the food in her mouth. When he starts to laugh, she swallows her bite and glares at him. “Sorry, kid,” he says, taking in her disgruntled expression, “but no-one could beat my little sister in any kind of eating competition. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

Ms. Marvel raises an eyebrow at him. “Dude,” she says, crossing her arms, “you know I can like, _shapeshift_ , right? I could like, just stretch my stomach all the way out to Seattle and just keep shoving pie in my face.” She drops her voice a couple of octaves and pulls on a mock-serious face. “I could do this all day.”

He assumes she’s mocking some kind of authority figure, but he’s not quite sure if he should ask who. His confusion must’ve shown on his face because she snaps out of it and says, “come on, I wasn’t that bad! ‘S my best Captain America impression!” At his continued silence, she narrows her eyes. “How have you never heard of Captain America? Seriously, dude, an uber-tall blond guy wrapped in the American flag? You’re kidding, right?” She punctuates her question with a sharp slurp on her soda, eyebrows disappearing into her hair. 

It’s not that he doesn’t know of Captain America - he’s heard of him, but only in passing. The New York-Avengers crowd is something he tends to steer clear of, preferring the company of the Justice League and the Titans. The media tends to fixate more on the Avengers anyway, because of how Tony Stark revealed himself to be Iron Man. Bruce thinks Stark’s a moron for the reveal, but it makes things a whole lot easier when the League can operate on the down-low without being questioned over every decision by the public, thanks to Stark's liking to publicize himself and his team. Obviously, he doesn’t say all of this to Ms. Marvel. He opts for the easier answer, which happens to be:

“I...live in Gotham?”

Ms. Marvel considers this, draining her soda cup noisily. She shrugs. “Meh. ‘S understandable. Gotham’s freaky, dude. I don’t know how you can live there. But you probably don’t have time to keep track of good ol’ Cap if there’s a psycho killer clown on the loose every five days.”

Dick wants to protest, because he’s not _that_ bad at crime-fighting, but then he realizes that to an outsider the only reason Gotham would make state-wide news would be the escape of the Joker after what seems to be every five days. (He’s with Jason on this one - killing the Joker would result in less civilian casualties and maybe more nights off.) He’s snapped out of his thoughts by the kid’s continuous chatter, and he tunes back in just fast enough to hear her say “-yway, I would SO win that pie-eating contest with your little sister. My powers are like no other, baby! At least, I, um, think so.”

Her admission stops him in his tracks. “Wait...If your powers are unique, how’s your mentor training you?”

“My...mentor?” Her eyebrows are scrunched up in confusion, and the alarm bells are going off in his head. She is way too young to be operating as a solo hero, especially with meta-powers that don’t seem to be related to heroes with any kind of seniority. She looks to be, what, sixteen? Her outfit’s home-made. Oh. God. He can feel his smile slipping, his eyes widening. She’s supposed to be home, doing math homework and crushing on boys, not fighting crime without help. 

“Mr. Nightwing? You good?” He shakes himself back to focus. “Kid,” he starts, biting his lip, “Kid. Your mentor, you know, the one who helped you with your powers, gave you the outfit and everything? The one you can go to if you’re hurt, or need help?”

Her expression clears up, and she grins. “Oh, that kind of mentor. I have a bunch of those. Well, they show up from time to time and kinda help me with whatever crisis I’m going through at the time. Queen Medusa, and Wolverine, and Iron Man that one time. Captain Marvel, too.” She shrugs. “They’re all pretty cool, but Jersey City’s not that dangerous. I got it covered, dude! Don’t sweat it.” 

Looking at her smiling with all the bravado that only a teenager could muster makes something in Dick’s heart crumble a little. He wants to fight her, say that she needs someone looking out for her permanently, but he remembers how well that went down when Bruce said the same thing to him at sixteen. It’s not even really his business, to be honest - the roster of heroes she listed off seems impressive enough to protect her, and she’s got powers. 

She’ll be fine. This is fine. He is _not_ dying inside. 

“So, Captain Marvel?” he asks, by way of starting conversation. “You can’t tell me you’ve never heard of Captain Marvel. Dude. Come ON.” She seems genuinely scandalized that he’s not keeping tabs on her favourite hero. It’s cute. “You’re from Gotham, not from under a rock! Are you telling me you don’t have the internet?”

“I’m not actually located in Gotham anymore, actually,” he says thoughtfully. “Moved to Bludhaven a while back.” 

“Somehow, that’s worse, Mr. Nightwing. Bludhaven is, like, the WORST. All you hear from there’s the casino businesses and the corruption!”

Dick laughs - he can’t help it. “Tell me something I don’t know, kid. Now, this Captain Marvel? You two share a name, what’s that about?”

He gets the impression that Ms. Marvel’s blushing with embarrassment as she describes the accidental stealing of Captain Marvel’s previous identity, but he can’t be sure because the blush doesn’t actually show on her tan skin. She looks sheepish though, the same way Duke looks when he gets caught up (and told off for getting caught up) in some petty fight between Damian and Tim. He crosses his arms and leans back against the vinyl diner seats as she details her story of woe and he can almost pretend this is Steph, chattering away about some gossip from school or her latest favourite shade of purple, or Jason from _before_ telling him about something stupid Bruce did recently. It aches just a little bit, that his own siblings won’t talk to him like this after Spyral, but he shoves that feeling into its own ugly little box and carries on listening to her talk. 

She stops abruptly, and gets up with an apologetic look on her face. “Sorry for keeping you so long, oh my GOD it’s eleven already? I gotta get home. Sorry!” She’s almost halfway out the door when she turns back and grins at him. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Nightwing! Bring your sister next time! OkaygottagoI’llseeyouaroundbyeeee!” With that final jumble of words she runs out of the diner, presumably on her way home. He’s about to let her run off, but then something hits him.

“Kid!” he yells, running after her. “Kid! Wait up!”

She stops about halfway down the street and turns around, clearly confused. “Dude, my mom is going to MURDER me if she checks in on me and I’m not in my room. I gotta go!” 

He holds up a hand, motioning her to stop for a second, and then hands her a small card with his number printed on it. “For emergencies,” he pants, slightly out of breath. “If you ever need backup, or medical help, or just advice, call, okay? You need someone watching your back, kiddo. I know I just met you, and this is crazy, but this is my personal number, so holler if you need me, ‘kay?

She accepts the card, twirling it in between her fingers with a curious expression. “Thanks,” she replies mildly, taking in the neat block numbers on either side of the card. “You don’t have to worry, really. But thanks.” Dick just smiles in return. “Get home safe, Ms. Marvel. I’ll see you around, when I take time off from fighting psycho clowns to vacation in your pretty city, yeah?”

He turns to leave, but stops when he feels a tap on his shoulder. “One last thing,” she says, a mischievous smile making its way onto her face, “did you quote Carly Rae Jepsen on purpose, or is that what you think is _genuinely_ ‘hip with the kids’?” She says the last part with little air-quotes, and there’s a barely-disguised giggle in her voice when she stage-whispers “You should probably update your dictionary before you embarrass your sister, grandpa!”

Before he can respond, she laughs, loud and bright and then she’s off, taking giant steps as she makes her way home. He hopes she keeps laughing - she’s a sweet kid, and she deserves the world (barring all the bad things. She deserves a world made of rainbows and sparkles). He chuckles, and gives her silhouette a half-salute before shooting his grapple gun onto the nearest building and shooting up, up and away into the night. 

* * *

(He’s halfway across the city when he remembers that he forgot to leave a tip for the free food. Goddamnit, Nightwing.)

  
  


  
  
  



	2. Jason

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Red Hood takes a detour into Jersey City. You already know who he's gonna meet there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was inspired by that one comic panel where the villain of the day calls Kamala a "little girl" and she calls him a "sexist jerk" and then beats him into the ground. we stan one very empowered 5 4" Pakistani-American teenager.
> 
> also inspired by that bit before Secret Wars where Carol calls Kamala short and she's extremely offended. 10/10 relatable content. 
> 
> enjoy :D!

The ratta-tat-tat of gunfire echoed in the alley as the idiots at the end of it shot anywhere but at him. He responded in kind, shooting from around the corner of the dumpster he was hiding behind. The firing paused for a second, and Jason heard the sound of a gun being clumsily reloaded before the shots resumed. Seriously, their shooting was so awful that he was almost tempted to go up and give his attackers a homemade coupon redeemable for one arms-handling lesson with yours truly. 

Almost. 

Again, the idiot in the lead ran out of bullets, so Jason took advantage of the man’s clear undertraining to jump out from behind the dumpster and fire a few well-placed shots, watching him and his pack of goons go down like targets at a fairground game. They weren’t seriously hurt, not really, (courtesy of his rubber bullets) - they’d live to keep peddling their shit drugs to highschoolers in want of a cheap high. These morons were Gothamites through and through, no doubt, but they were no major players. Unable to compete with the hard competition in their beloved hometown, they’d set off to make a profit off of rebellious teenagers in one of the quieter cities up north in Jersey, namely - Jersey City. He’d have liked to put a bullet through each of their thick skulls, but this wasn’t his turf and a slaughter of petty criminals in a sleepy riverside town wouldn’t go down too well with the Bats.

Jason could feel his blood boiling as he thought of their potential victims, all the kids whose lives could’ve been ruined by these asshats, so maybe he put a touch too much force when he stepped on the lead thug’s fingers. Hearing that satisfying _crack_ and the ensuing blubbering didn’t fix his state of mind altogether, but that wasn’t to say he didn’t appreciate it. 

“Tell your boss,” he grinds out, voice deep and threatening behind the helmet, “that if I ever catch him selling this shit again, in Gotham, in New Jersey, wherever, I’ll do a lot more than just bust up his most stupid squad of goons. Understood?” 

The guy’s sobbing now, all his earlier bravado having taken a hike. His cronies are gingerly picking themselves off of the ground, some whimpering and backing away, others groaning with their eyes closed. Bullets can be fatal, but there are some things worse than death. For example, bruising in places that should have never been bruised. These losers are going to be pretty sore after tonight’s little adventure; hopefully, that’ll deter them from a second shot at being petty drug lords.

He leans against the wall, smirking (not that they can see it), arms crossed against his chest. There’s one last guy there, scrambling to get up on his feet and get away, and Jason plans to let him - until he stands up and holds out his revolver, hands shaking. Jason sighs internally. These guys just don’t learn, do they?

“Put your hands up,” says the guy. There’s a manic look in his eyes and his gun is wobbling as he points it at Jason. Six-foot nothing blond gangly beanpole, a weird cross of hysteria and heroism on his face. He’s not going to shoot, not now, not ever. Too much of a coward. 

“I said,” yells Beanpole, “h-hands where I can see ‘em!”

Jason rolls his eyes. “You gonna shoot me, asshole? Go ahead. I’d like to see you try.”

Beanpole clicks off the safety, and Jason moves away from the wall, suddenly alert, because _oh shit, he might actually shoot me._ The idiot aims his gun, Jason locked in his sights but before he can pull the trigger, a- a giant _fist??_ knocks Beanpole clean off his feet and onto his ass.

“You do a pretty terrible impression of a cop, mister,” someone snarks behind Jason. Based on the voice, it sounds like a teenage girl, but he’s not about to turn and check. He’s smarter than the rest of the family that way, you know? Something about being killed and brought back instills a sense of self-preservation into a guy. The hand in front of him shrinks and clicks the safety of the gun back on, and then plucks the gun from Beanpole’s grasp. The arm that this magical, shapeshifting hand is attached to (that freakishly long and very rubbery looking arm coming out from behind him, what the _hell_ ) retracts, and only then does Jason turn around, very, very slowly. 

He wasn’t wrong. It was a teenage girl. A very brightly-colored, highschool-student size, teenage girl. Huh. She’s standing a few feet behind him, arms crossed and eyes narrowed as she stares Jason down. 

“Who the hell are you?” The question escapes him before he can dial down his hostility. Luckily, the girl takes it in stride. She puts her hands on her hips and grins, cocking her head to size him up.

“A thank-you wouldn’t be amiss, y’know. I _diiiid_ just kinda save your life, dude.”

“As if I needed the help, kid. Get lost.” The grin on her face doesn’t disappear, but something about her demeanour gets slightly sharper. 

“Alright then,” she says, her tone still playful, “have fun dealing with JCPD by yourself, then, _dick_.” He can’t help barking out a laugh at that. 

“What’s so funny?”

“That’s my brother’s name, actually.”

That gets her attention. “Seriously?” she asks, the earlier light-heartedness disappearing off her face to make way for disgust-confusion-curiosity. “You’ve got to be joki- _take off your helmet, do it now!”_ Her hissed instructions take him aback before he hears the sirens and remembers her mentioning the police before. He fumbles with the clasp, but takes it off and tucks it against his hip, out of sight. Thank _fuck_ he’d been wearing the domino today. 

Colorful teenage girl takes charge as soon the cops get there, striding forward with a cheerful confidence that reminds him annoyingly of Nightwing. “Hiya, Officers! These two losers-” she kicks the leader in the side, prompting a groan, “-jumped my friend in the mask over there.”

Her tone belays none of the urgency she’d expressed before, but Jason watches her and she can’t keep all the nervosity out of her posture when she addresses the police. The policeman’s got his gun out, and suddenly Jason can see why Ms. Marvel’s so nervous.

The two cops visibly relax at the sight of the girl, although the younger one keeps his gun trained on Jason as he follows his partner over to the alley, his expression wary. 

The other one seems to have no such reservations. “Ms. Marvel,” she says, “fancy seeing you here.” Her tone is wry, but no-nonsense. “Hi, Officer McKay,” Ms. Marvel replies. “Hello, Officer Williams.”

Williams doesn’t respond. “There was a call about excessive gunfire about six minutes ago. You happen to know anything about that?” This question, like Williams’ gun, is aimed at Jason. 

Jason shrugs, his hands in the air. “I was just takin’ a stroll, Officer. This dude here decided that I would benefit from some holes in my _lovely_ leather jacket, and well, it really hurt my feelings.”

Williams doesn’t have a sense of humour, apparently. He keeps the gun pointed at Jason, but Ms. Marvel steps in before either of them can escalate the conversation. “It’s true,” she says, glancing at Jason. “Well, somewhat so. I saw him enter that abandoned pizza place on the corner of Halladay and Lafayette, and I hung around to see what was going on. He walked in on a bunch of these idiots-” she nods at the guys on the ground “-and they started firing. I watched him run all the way here, and he only responded when they had him cornered. They weren’t even real bullets! Just rubber ones, look.” 

Jason’s shocked. How hadn’t he noticed a whole superhero tracking his every move- and how did she know what went down in that pizza place? 

“These are the guys you’ve been looking for, right? Newest distributors in this neighbourhood? If you go to that address, you’ll find a makeshift lab in the old kitchen. Trust me.” And trust her they do, because Williams finally holsters his weapon and bends to cuff the two on the ground. 

Jason takes this as his cue to melt into the background, Batman-style. The training had to be useful for something, right?

McKay’s got her hands on her hips and she looks appraising. “Thanks, Ms. Marvel. Make sure your... friend there doesn’t get into anymore trouble, hm? Now scram, before the others get here. I’ll...” her voice fades as Jason shoots his grapple gun onto the edge of the nearest building and flies away. He catches the trio on the ground watching him as he does, so gives a little mock-salute before landing hard on the roof of the building and running. 

* * *

About half an hour later, he’s sitting on the rooftop of a tall building by the waterfront, watching the river and enjoying a cigarette when he hears a pair of feet land on the cement behind him. It’s the Marvel kid, he can tell, but he’s not about to turn around without his helmet on. She takes the lack of response as an invitation (of course she does) and plonks herself down on the edge of the rooftop, knocking her heels against the wall like a child. 

She wrinkles her nose at the smoke from the cigarette. “You know, those things’ll kill you. Lung cancer, and all that.” Jason just shrugs in response and takes another drag. So, she can’t be any older than seventeen; clearly, she grew up with the anti-smoking campaigns they do in schools these days.

She’s not chatty, though, save from the smoking spiel. Her heels hit the bricks with a soft continuous _thunk-thunk_ , and she’s drumming a different rhythm with either hand, but if he listens closely they sound like they’re part of the same song. They sit there like that for a few minutes, Jason’s helmet in his lap, Marvel paying him no attention as she gazes intensely at the water. He wants to break the silence, but she makes no movement to indicate that she’s interested in a conversation. Maybe she just likes the view?

He settles on “So, kid. Any particular reason you decided to follow me all the way up here?” to break the ice.

That gets her attention, and she turns slightly to face him. “No,” she says evenly, “but you have a brother named _Dick_ , and I could use a good laugh.”

Now it’s Jason’s turn to face the kid. “You- you followed a violent, possibly dangerous vigilante- you stuck up for someone openly carrying guns and stepping on people's hands- because my brother has an incredibly dated nickname? You're either ridiculously stupid or overly trusting, and I honestly don't know which'd be worse, kid." He punctuates this sentence with a deep exhale of smoke, the grey curls dissipating into the clear night sky.

Ms. Marvel drags her hands down her face dramatically and groans, flickering her eyelids in true teenage fashion. “Men. Are. The. Worst. Why do all of you always assume that I don’t know what I’m doing?” She’s no longer groaning, but she is gesturing very wildly at the open sky in front of them. He’s kinda scared she’ll fall. “Is it because I’m a girl, or-or because I’m short?? Height doesn’t correlate to intelligence, _by the way,_ ” she adds scathingly, “because you’re built like, like a _freakin’_ supersoldier-and I should _know,_ I’ve _met_ one- and yet you didn’t stop to think that MAYBE I helped you out with the GCPD because I had other reasons to trust you, Red Hood?” 

Jason moves too quick to face her, and he can feel the confusion showing on his face. Damn the domino! He wishes he’d been wearing his helmet. 

She registers his confusion instantly, and smirks at him. “That’s right, I know who you are. And I know the kind of people you hurt, dude. You target drug rings and child abusers, and all the worst kinds of criminals-” Jason can feel his hackles rise, his fists clenching, ready to defend his choices in life until she says “-and as gruesome as it is, I think it works. 'Whosoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved all of mankind,' -my dad always says that, and despite your actions also applying to 'whosoever takes a life, it is as if he killed all of mankind,' and I think you're probably saving more lives, so.”

Ms. Marvel stops to take a deep breath after that word-vomit. He...was not expecting that last part, to say the least. "Well," he grumbles, "my dad says fun stuff like "Don't kill the Joker, even though he's killed more people than I've ever met, I'll disown you if you do."

She looks appropriately disturbed at that statement, but she shakes her head like she's physically trying to clear her head and forges on anyway.

“You also wear the Bat on your armour, cool decal by the way, and _HoodWatch_ says that you’ve basically ditched real bullets altogether, which means that even if you tried to shoot me, wouldn’t have actually left any actual damage, plus I figure if you went all murder-y again you’d get yourself a new shirt, so,” she lists off, counting the reasons on her fingers.

Huh. She’s smart, and sassy. Jason finds himself liking her, but he’s kind of too preoccupied with the words that just came out of her mouth to tell her as much. “ _H_ _oodWatch_?!?!”

She wrinkles her nose, and honest-to-God _giggles_ when she says “Yeah, they’re uh, they’re this Tumblr blog that kind of tracks your, well, what would you call them, uh, stats? Anyway, they said that you’ve been teaming up with Batman more often now, and apparently there are fewer bullet injuries, uh, attributed to you.”

Yep. Definitely younger than seventeen. She’s getting her intel off a blog, what the FUCK. Her mouth is twisted in a scowl, and she’s looking at the cigarette with more judgment now, so he quickly puts it out. 

“Okay, look,” he says, raising his palms defensively, “It’s not that you’re a girl, okay? It’s more, hmm, more...” he trails off, unable to find the right words to explain. “You’re very...colorful, okay?” he says, eyeing her blue-and-red dress/tunic thing. “You’ve got the whole...primary-color theme goin’ on, and I made the mistake of assuming you were just a kid playin’ hero. You’re also tiny,” he adds as an afterthought. He doesn't say _your outfit reminds me of my own at your age_ because that would make him sound _old_ and he is _not_ that old.

Ms. Marvel stares at him, confusion and annoyance etched into her young face. He sighs. “Look. Your get-up isn’t suitable for a vigilante, and you act way too young to be experienced. My bad,” he gets out, watching her frown slowly work itself into a smirk. He’s not sure why he made that mistake, because his foray into the vigilante world was preceded by the living embodiment of sunshine, and that specific asshole could kick anyone’s ass. Probably even Batman’s. 

“Well, that was a dumb mistake on your part, because I'm a _superhero_ , Mr...Hood? Mr. Red? What do you want me to call you?” 

“Please, call me Red. Mr. Hood was my father,” Jason replies amusedly, because damn, he’s never been called _Mr._ Hood, not even by the Crime Alley kids that are both scared shitless of him and also ask him for piggyback rides. And then, something about this kid who’s wearing a giant yellow lightning bolt on her bright blue shirt makes him say, “actually, you know what, Ms. Marvel? Call me Jay. ‘S nice to meet you.”

Ms. Marvel’s smile grows ever-wider and she kicks her legs against the building with renewed enthusiasm. “Jay like the letter, or Jay like the bird?” she asks, her amusement growing. “Or Jay like short for something, like...Jason?”

Jason answers too quickly, and he’s sure his face gives it away when he says “just Jay, kid. No "mister" shit, okay?” He’s got to start practicing controlling his emotions again - he’s too reliant on the stupid helmet. The same stupid helmet that Ms. Marvel’s picked up and is now holding it like the skull from _Hamlet_ , because she’s a fidgety teenager and he’s been distracted for a grand total of two and a half minutes. 

He watches her out of the corner of his eye, sees her hold it out and study it carefully before fiddling with the latch on the side. She manages to get it open and looks at the explosives rigged to go off inside it as he puts a new cigarette to his lips.

“This...this would blow up, right, if someone tried to open it while you were still wearing it?” Her voice is small, and her expression is sober. Jason sighs.

“Yeah,” he says, turning back to face the marina, “yeah. My secret I.D.’s pretty important to me.” Marvel frowns, but doesn’t say anything. She sets the helmet down gingerly next to him, gently clicking the faceplate shut with two fingers. She stares at it, like she’s trying to identify something, and then turns back to face the water, leaning back to take in the view. They sit like that for a while, neither party saying a word out loud. The salty air coasts over Jason’s skin and he takes in the beauty of the moonlight scattering in fractals over the breaking waves, the scene accompanied with the muted sound of boots hitting bricks in the background. 

“Aren’t you worried about the lawsuit?” she asks neutrally, _too neutrally_ , and it catches Jason off-guard. 

“The what?” 

“The lawsuit,” she says slowly, “from Iron Man for having an ugly-ass back-alley bootleg version of his helmet?” 

Jason splutters so hard in shock that he drops the cigarette over the side of the building, and Ms. Marvel bursts into a fresh set of giggles at his side. He feels his cheeks reddening and he buries his face in his hands, but she’s howling with laughter now, the childish sound echoing across the sky.

She dabs at her eyes with her scarf-thing, and he removes one hand from his burning face to flip her off. 

* * *

Somewhere along the way they ended up at a dinky little ice-cream parlour in the city. Jason had gotten hungry, and Marvel had brightened up at the idea of food. Jason had asked if Jersey City had any reputable chili-dog vendors, but they did not. Apparently there was a good hot-dog cart by the park, if Jason would like a hot-dog, that is, because Ms. Marvel couldn’t eat hot-dogs because they weren’t, quote-unquote, hala-hmm, vegetarian. So then Jason had asked about ice-cream because it’s Friday and he deserves a healthy scoop of Neapolitan for his drug-ring-destroying efforts. She had clapped delightedly at the idea and led him to this place, which wasn’t half bad, actually. She was a regular here, she explains, and so she gets the ice-cream for half-price. 

“So,” she says, once they’re sat down at one of the parlor’s tiny tin tables and she has a smear of cookie-dough ice-cream on her chin, “You still haven’t told me about your brother’s poor life choices. I’m dying to hear this story, Jay. Spi-i-ill.” 

Jason, with a matching streak of ice cream across his upper lip, regrets his offhand comment from earlier because now she won’t let it go. He likes her, but he also doesn’t want to be responsible for exposing Dickhead’s identity by accident. So he stalls. “How ‘bout a trade,” he proposes. “You tell me how you knew what I was doing inside that pizza place, and all other relevant details, and I’ll tell you why my brother has such shit choice in nicknames.” She pauses to consider this, absently tapping her spoon against her chin. “Fine,” she says.

“Those guys you took down are mostly new,” she begins. “Jersey City isn’t exactly Crime Central, so the police took notice pretty fast, but their base of operations isn’t here. Most of the drug trade here is your usual stuff, and the dealers don’t usually go after kids. So I’ve been doing my own investigation, and I found out that they’re from your city, and then I figured it would only be a matter of time until you Gotham heroes showed up to help.”

“It wasn’t guaranteed, though,” Jason points out. “What evidence do you have that we would’ve come?”

“The Batman has a history of...following up cases in other cities, when trouble leaks from Gotham. All of you seem to be affiliated with him, and I had to wait until today anyway for that meet-up that you walked into. If none of you had come by then, I’d have given the intel to the police on my own.” 

That made a decent amount of sense, Jason had to admit. “How did you track me, though, without me knowing? No offense, but you’re kind of too brightly colored to miss.”

Then Ms. Marvel does this endearing thing where she props up her head on her hands and looks at Jason like he’s the biggest fool on this side of the Atlantic, and sighs loudly. “Jay. My dude. Superpowers, remember? I just shrunk myself down and ran along the rooftops while following you.”

Jason is the biggest fool on this side of the Atlantic. 

“I watched you get shot at, and then I followed you all the way to the alley and you shot back with your rubber bullets and so that’s why I helped you with the JCPD because ya know, the police tend to operate on shoot-first ask-later policies these days. Your helmet-thing is horrible and inspires a lot of fear, so you would’ve definitely been taken into custody or worse if you hadn’t taken it off when I told you. Anyway. My turn. What’s this about a brother named...Dick?”

Jason snorts. Nothing gets past this kid, huh? Here goes nothing. “His name’s actually Richard. Decent name, all in all but he refuses to go by it, like outright refuses to go by Richard. The moron insisted that I call him Dick from the first time I met him. In all honesty? He lives up to the name. Older brothers suck, kid. Try not to have any.”

Ms. Marvel slurps some ice-cream thoughtfully. “‘S a bit late for that now,” she says. “I have an older brother too, and he’s suuuuper annoying. Sometimes my mom looks at him and I think she’s, like, facepalming, but metaphorically, y’know? Your brother can’t be too bad, I mean, mine’s like...unemployed and _super_ preachy.”

“Oh yeah? Dick’s the biggest embarrassment to ever grace this earth. With him, it’s like he was born in the 40s, and then immediately decided that his favourite era was the bad parts of the 70s and 80s. He had a _mullet_ , once, it was awful. He used to put it in this stupid rat-tail, man it was _bad,_ ” he wheezes. The kid bursts out in a delighted laugh, and he can’t resist. “This isn’t even covering the disco suit, man.” Marvel raises her eyebrows amusedly at him and he waves a hand disinterestedly in her direction. “Before your time, kid.”

That piques her interest. She leans forward, arms crossed on the table. “Pictures?” she asks, barely-contained curiosity coloring her tone. 

“Only got a burner on me, kid. Sorry.” He’s lying, obviously. She doesn’t know that, but if he shows her Dickface’s Discowing suit, she’d put two and two together and get a grand total of Dick Grayson Moonlights As A Stupid Vigilante! And then all hell would break loose. 

Her shoulders slump with disappointment and she fake-pouts. She’s really expressive, this Marvel kid. Someone’s gotta train it out of her. But then she’s off and running onto her next line of inquiry, which happens to be:

“How do you get Dick from Richard, anyway? Is it like, shorten it to...Rich? And then replace the ‘h’ with a ‘k’ and then...”

“You ask him nicely,” Jason cuts in, smirking. 

Ms. Marvel goes bright red (or at least as red as a kid with her tan complexion can) and she doesn’t meet Jason’s eyes (domino lenses) for the next few minutes, hand over her mouth as she stifles a spit-take. Jason almost warns her to not choke on the ice-cream, but her expression indicates it’s too late for that. He watches her cough loudly, trying to clear her throat, and calmly takes another bite of his ice-cream. 

They sit there in silence for a bit longer, and his Neapolitan is a soupy mess of pink and brown and off-white. Ms. Marvel is still a shade of red, but he can’t tell if it’s embarrassment or exertion coloring her cheeks. He stirs his spoon absently, and looks out of the window they’re seated next to. The walls are a shade of mint, with a cheap gold border around the glass of the window. The seat cushions are green too, set in a gold frame to match the gaudy windows. Hurts his eyes, a little bit.

Hurts his ears too, when she puts her fingertips on the edge of the table pushes her chair away and the _scccreeeak_ of tin against tiles fills the air. “I gotta go. But I wanted to ask you a question before I leave, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, I mean it’s all your choice but I’d really like it if you answered, and...”

Jason snorts. “Kid, spit it out before you hurt yourself, yeah?”

Ms. Marvel takes a deep breath. “Are you...adopted?” She winces at the end of her sentence, like it physically pained her to be that direct.

It’s probably the third time this evening that Jason’s been left completely dumbfounded by this kid. This doesn’t happen in Gotham. Stupid goddamned Jersey City and its’ hyperperceptive meta teenage superheroes, getting all up in his business, the hell did he come here for? Not for _fuckin’_ this!

Ms. Marvel seems to pick up on his sudden change in mood, because she puts up her hands defensively and gives him a nervous smile. “Nevermind,” she says, backing away towards the door, “Forget I asked! Clearly none of my business, sorry, sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. Okaygottagoseeyouaround _byeee_!” and then all he sees her red scarf flapping in the breeze behind her as she runs off down the street. 

* * *

He leaves quickly, after that. Despite the frankly pleasant evening he spent in Jersey City, he can’t shake the sense of foreboding in his stomach that follows him past the city limits.

Or maybe it’s not foreboding. Maybe it was just bad ice-cream. Whatever. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would also like to add that despite there being police characters in this fic, I do not support American law enforcement agencies in any shape or form. Also, any and all places in this fic are made up because I'm lazy and didn't do too much research. ;)
> 
> hope you liked it! maybe I'll do a Tim chapter next. who knows. 
> 
> and hey? thanks.


	3. Cass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cass makes a new friend. Spoiler alert: they get along quite well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied. I said I was going to do a Tim chapter, and then I Lied. Whoops. Next one will be Tim, though. Promise.
> 
> Have this instead, because we need more Asian Women In Superheroing solidarity. Also there's a Steph cameo in here bc I <3 Steph. 
> 
> enjoy! :D

Cass liked to move. 

Well, obviously she liked her mobility, but in this instance, she meant the act of moving around. Like moving around to different cities, and seeing new places and helping new people. Sure, she loved Gotham, but it got tedious after a while, you know? Same old streets, gangs, muggers, bla bla bla. They all said the same things and did the same things, and Cass liked routine, but they could at least try to be a bit more creative. Some quiet nights she’d spend watching the city from way up high, and she’d wonder how Bruce hadn’t lost his mind being Batman, patrolling the city for years on years. Every day was the same. 

So when Bruce needed one of them to go check up on possible criminal activity in upstate New Jersey, Cass had jumped at the chance. Well, less jumped, more clapped in delight and smiled at Bruce until he assigned the lead to her. And that was that. Bruce had asked if she’d wanted anyone else along, but Cass had just leaned against the BatComputer console and given Bruce a single raised eyebrow until he looked away apologetically and told her the rest of the details for the trip. 

She was apparently headed to Jersey City, a small-ish city near the New Jersey/New York border, and she was to look into some strange activity there. Batman would have looked into it earlier, but Gotham just wasn’t letting go. There had been an Arkham outbreak the last time this had come up, and then the time after that the Mayor had been taken hostage. And then there was that League thing, and then... At some point, Cass had lost track of Batman’s commitments.

There had been reports of strange, mostly unexplainable events occurring in the last year or so, several reports of a woman with inhumanly long hair and a one-off incident where the residents of the city had encountered some kind of hallucinogenic mist. Cass didn’t think it was a big deal, or that Batman should concern himself with it; Gotham kept his hands full, and it did not fall to their family to look after the entire state. She also thought that if something major were to be going on, there would be more signs - more casualties, more killings, more  _ something _ . Instead, Jersey City was just functioning as most other cities did. Of course, there was a very tall-scary-foreign building in the Hudson, but that didn’t really strike Cass as too dangerous. It was just a building.

She was under strict instructions to  _ not engage, you don’t know what they’re capable of, recon only, do not enter that imposing building in the Hudson, RECON only, Cass, do I make myself clear? _ She had rolled her eyes and mock-saluted him, and Bruce had sighed loudly. At least he was being Bruce and not Batman. It was frustrating when he refused to be Bruce.

Batman had become Bruce when he’d been setting the coordinates for the landing, and his usual flat-line mouth had curled slightly downward. Cass had looked at him, and he had squared his shoulders but said nothing. A few minutes later he relented and explained: “Iron Man - Anthony Stark - He keeps a tight watch on the New York airspace,” he’d explained. “It could pose...problems, if he realized where the tech was coming from.” 

He wasn’t lying, not entirely, but he was masking the real reason he was anxious - he was worried for her, being alone somewhere new, possibly facing off people he had no information on. She had just gently patted him on the bicep and watched the tension shift in his face. His shoulders were still held stiff, but he was smiling with his eyes now.

She liked it when he did that. 

* * *

The Batplane was on autopilot as it sped Cass towards the city. It was only a short trip, but she was on a video call on a secure line with Steph who was busy studying for finals. She would have taken Steph with her, but because it was June and she needed to pass her classes if she was serious about becoming a nurse, she had hidden the trip from her friend so as to not tempt her. Presently though, Steph had taken a break from her notes and was painting her nails a vicious shade of violet as she talked to Cass. 

“I wanna go on vacation too! You should’ve told me, I would’ve come. We could’ve made it a girls’ trip! We could’ve used your card to empty Bruce’s bank account on cute clothes and nail polish n’ stuff,” Steph whines through the phone. 

Cass just tilts her head in response. “Studying?”

Steph huffs. “Okay, so finals are important, sure, but like, imagine the fun we could’ve had. Why’d you have to go this weekend anyway? Jersey City will still be standing next week, and exams end Wednesday.”

“Drug bust next Friday,” says Cass, smiling apologetically. “New York crowd is...acting up. Bat-senses tingling -  _ off the charts _ ,” she pronounces slowly, bringing her fingers up to either side of her head to mimic Batman’s cowl. 

Steph snorts. “He wouldn’t be himself without the Bat-Paranoia. He should trademark that. Bat-Paranoia. Hey, do you think Dick trademarked all the Bat-stuff he named when he first got there? Like, he’d be rolling in royalties, right? If he hasn’t, I’m going to. Gotta fund my college education somehow, right?” 

“Yes,” says Cass warmly. 

They enjoy each other’s company in silence for a bit, and Cass watches the sun dip behind the clouds, painting the sky in streaks of orange and pink and baby blue. Summer sunsets were always better than winter ones, in her opinion. More vibrant, more real. Made her feel things more deeply. The Statue of Liberty is visible close by, and she can see That Imposing Building that she isn’t supposed to enter. 

“Steph,” she says, prompting the other girl to look up from her nails, “Have to go. Talk to you later?”

“Absolutely. Call me as soon as you’re done and tell me everything, okay? Keep an eye out for any cute boys. Good luck, stay safe!!”

Cass smiles. “Yes. Thank you. Do not die while studying.” She swipes the call to end over the image of Steph giving her a purple-nailed peace sign.

The plane drops her off near the tower, and she takes in the sight of this building that she is  _ expressly forbidden _ from entering. The pink light emanating from the hole in the center seems to get brighter in the increasing darkness, a magenta glow contrasting against the dull purple flooding the horizon. There’s four lights embedded in the ground in front of the entrance, casting an eerie glow onto the tower’s facade. Cass takes a second to take it all in, the sheer strangeness of it all - she’s never seen anything quite like it. She makes sure her mask’s in place, her comm link’s active, and then she pulls her hood up. 

The imposing building is situated on an island of...scrap metal. Or trash. It’s hard to tell in the low light, but Cass sticks close to the shadows to avoid being seen by anyone nearby. The evening air is not humid, exactly, but she’s glad she decided not to wear the full-face mask today. 

There are ridges around the tower, like if a snowglobe had been smashed leaving behind only the base and the little model inside if snowglobes were made of scrap metal, that is. Cass’s mind wanders absently back to the little snowglobe she had gotten for Alfred and its place on the living room mantle, how the little flakes inside spun in dizzying swirls when you shook it.

The tower itself rises tall in the center, built like...like an oversized antenna, thinks Cass. Like a piece of something else, like it belonged to some other place, some other time. The edges look torn, and the dull grey metal shows signs of battle-damage. There are actual antennae on the top of the tower, little red lights blinking from the tips of the metal rods. She’d assume it’s alien, but Cass doesn’t have a lot of experience with aliens apart from Stephanie’s ceaseless chatter about how _ unfair _ it is that Kara Zor-El is  _ super-freaking-gorgeous _ and never gets acne and she’s got muscles to rival Superman. She scans the building for any signs of movement, any indication of guards or lookouts or something, but she comes up empty.

It strikes her as odd, that such a place would be completely unguarded, but she’s not one for wasting time on overthinking. Quickly and quietly she makes her way to the side of the tower, and her eyes rove the length of it, looking for some kind of entry point or window or something. And then she spots it. High above her and a little to the left, she sees a tunnel-like space. It looks to be through-and-through, coming out into the open on the other side. It seems to be the only other open point on the building, apart from the doorless entry-way she saw at the front of the tower, so she takes out her grapple-gun and fires.

There are enough ridges and breaks? defects? on the metal structure to make it an easy climb. Her grapple snags a bit more than half-way up the structure, and the retracting motion pulls her up, the wind whooshing past her, making her skin sting from where her hair whips against her face. She loves it - the swoop in her stomach as she lifts off every time leaves her smiling every time. She lands gently against the side of the building, and the fingers of her free hand immediately hook into the metal. Her feet find footholds easily, and she shoots her grapple again, this time catching on the edge of the tunnel she’d been aiming for. Another click of the grapple and all of a sudden she’s up, up and into the crawlspace. 

The metal is cool enough that she can feel it through her gloves, the wind whistling in her ears as she crouches and peers out of the edge of the tunnel. The city twinkles below her, lights being turned on in apartment buildings and the network of street-lamps through the city getting brighter as the night falls. The wind pushes blue-purple clouds across the horizon, and Cass tips her head gently to the left to watch as the sky goes from orange-pink-grey-blue to purple-blue-black. The tunnel is loud around her, as wind-chambers are, and she stands and walks to the center of the tube, her feet soundless against the grey surface.

Her guess had been right. She could see the Statue of Liberty through the other end of the metal tube, staring blankly into the distance. What really got Cass’s attention, though, was the window up ahead of her. Right in the center of the floor of the tube, a circle cut neatly out, replaced with a sheet of glass looking down into the space below. She can hear Alfred in her mind, saying “Windows are in walls, Miss Cassandra,” but she’s honestly not sure how else to describe it. She leans forward and places a hand on the cool glass, testing for insecurity. It doesn’t creak, or move, or spiderweb-crack the way Jason’s phone screen has when he steps on it again, so she drops to her knees and peers down through the window. 

The sight takes her breath away. 

It’s a tall, tall room. A platform in the center, and a tall, a  _ sharp _ chair, in the center. Cass thinks that if the glass gives way beneath her hands, she would be impaled on-impact. She can hear the wet  _ shhk _ that her death would make, and she shudders. The room is lit well, white lights embedded in the ground elongating the shadows that every piece of jagged architecture casts. Ragged blue banners hang on the walls, and the same shade of blue is echoed in the carpet that makes a path up to the nightmare chair. It makes her feel cold, and empty. Like being in a fortress of ice, trapped with only the echo of her own voice. 

A tall woman enters the room, and walks slowly up to the chair. She walks up the steps, and seats herself on the chair with the dignity of a thousand Al Ghuls. The woman’s long red hair (is this who Bruce mentioned?) shifts as she tilts her head to regard a small figure in front of her, hands steepled, elbows resting against the armrests. Her posture says _ power _ , it says  _ stability _ . It says  _ pride _ , and  _ control.  _ Cass does not know this woman, not her name, not her history, but she knows that this woman commands something great, and Bruce would chide her for this, but Cass trusts the woman to think before using her power.

It isn’t until the little smudge of a person in front of the woman steps into the light does the image click together. The blue-and-red...girl comes into focus and she does a nervous-awestruck curtsey and scurries away, a piece of red fabric trailing in the air after her as she leaves. The woman shifts her posture slightly as the girl leaves, one leg crossed over the other in a slow, deliberate movement, her head coming to rest on her right hand as she holds up the other to wave the girl goodbye. 

_ Not an echo chamber,  _ says Tim’s voice at the back of her head.  _ A throne room.  _

* * *

Cass can’t enter the tower. She promised Bruce (not Batman) that she wouldn’t. If she had promised Batman, she might have considered breaking it, but she doesn’t want to hurt Bruce like that. There seem to be no other entry-ways into the building either, and this does not bother her. She has the rest of Jersey City to investigate.

She takes a flying leap from the edge of the tunnel, and twists in mid-air to shoot her grapple onto the edge of the tube, and she lands gently against the side of the tower. A little more than halfway down, she starts climbing down. The wall has so many handholds and footholds that it might be one of those rock-climbing walls that Damian insists he hates, but loves to show off on anyway. The wind is colder now, the night a much darker shade of indigo by the time she reaches the ground, and a conclusion is almost-fully formed in her mind. 

If she was right and the ice-hall was actually a throne room, then this was a palace, not a tower. Palaces meant royalty, and the woman who was sitting there then must be some kind of queen. Granted, she didn’t look much like any queen Cass had ever seen, Disney or otherwise, but her demeanor would make sense if she was. Was the girl in red and blue a servant? Some kind of...knight? Or a... how would you say ruled-by, um, uh, a subject?

Cass is inexperienced with Jersey City, but she assumes that it is not under the rule of a woman who really needs a haircut wearing a skintight purple outfit. Hopefully. Hopefully, it is not. She wants to find the red-and-blue girl, though, and see who she is. What she gets up to. 

Someone up there must be listening to her, because the girl is standing outside the palace steps, squinting at her phone. The blue glow illuminates her frustrated expression, and she swipes a couple of times before holding it up to get a signal, probably. She reads  _ angry-annoyed-inconvenienced _ , before it changes to  _ resigned.  _ The girl frowns sadly in defeat and clicks her phone off. 

It is at this very moment that Black Bat chooses to make her Jersey City debut, and steps soundlessly out of the shadow of the palace and towards the girl, who doesn’t notice her. Red-and-Blue is busy looking back at the palace, shifting her weight from foot to foot agitatedly, like she has to make a decision but doesn’t know what to do. Or she needs to pee, but doesn’t want to ask the queen to use the bathroom. 

Cass takes advantage of the girl’s dilemma to sneak up right behind her, and then tap her on the shoulder, very lightly, just a tap, but Red-and-Blue shrieks and throws her hands up, dropping her phone and spinning around only to come face-to-face with a masked and hooded Black Bat, which makes her shriek again and scoot backwards and she-

Enlarges her fists? The girl steps into a fighting stance, and her bracelets clink on her arm as she positions her hands to fight. (Her stance is wrong. Her fists are  _ wrong. _ ) The girl’s face is angry, but her eyes betray her confusion. 

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Her voice is sharp. (Everything here is sharp.)

Black Bat just holds her hands up in surrender. Carefully, not breaking eye contact, she stoops to pick up the fallen device, and holds it out to Red-and-Blue. “Yours,” she says calmly. “Dropped it.”

The girl shrinks her hands back to normal, and steps forward to take her phone back. Her head’s tilted, her shoulder-length hair falling onto her face. She’s still frowning suspiciously at Cass, and reaches for the phone very slowly. Her outfit seems impractical, thinks Cass. Too much flowing fabric, a lot of color. Reminds her of the first Robin outfit. 

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The girl goes back to looking at her phone, swiping hurriedly at the screen, flicking her eyes back to Black Bat periodically. Cass holds as still as she can to not alarm the girl. She has a lightning bolt on her blue shirt. A meta, then, dressed like a primary school painting.  _ Curiouser and curiouser, _ says Steph in her mind.

“Why are you so...frustrated with your phone?” asks Cass after four straight minutes of standing in silence. The girl’s apprehension has not lessened in the time that they have been standing here on Trash-Slash-Scrap-Metal-Island, despite Cass projecting her civilian self through the Bat-clothes to try and set her at ease. Her shoulders do lose some of the tense-ness they are carrying when Black Bat asks her the question, and her voice is level when she replies with:

“Trying to find a way back to Jersey City that doesn’t involve stepping in the river.”

Cass considers this for a moment. Then, “I can help.”

The girl looks up from her phone and snorts. “I may be short, but I’m not stupid. I don’t know you! Why should I trust you?”

This is as good a moment as any, thinks Cass, and she pushes her hood back. “I am Black Bat,” she says, tapping the bat on her chest with a smile. “Helping is my job.”

All the tension melts out of her frame like a popsicle in a Hong Kong summer. “You’re a Bat? Why didn’t you lead with that?”

* * *

The ride to Jersey City is not long. However, in the six minutes it took to get there, Cass now knows that the girl she is riding with is Ms. Marvel of Jersey City, a meta with stretchy-powers similar to those of Plastic Man’s. She is a huge, huge fan of both the Justice League and the Avengers, and idolises Captain Marvel and Iron Man in particular. (And Wonder Woman. HUGE fan of Wonder Woman. Jason would get along well with her.) She has heard of Batman, and seen the various reports of Batgirls and Robins over the years, but did not recognise Cass because she was not wearing her Orphan or Batgirl gear. She does, however, think that this look is “ _ so  _ badass!” and that “the way the yellow lines stand out against the black, is like, SO sophisticated,” and also that “you even manage to make arm wrap-thingies and a utility belt look cool!” That last point is elaborated on further even as they disembark the Batplane and start heading towards the actual city.

“-and so the first time I went out as Ms. Marvel I had a sort-of similar utility belt-type thing going on. It was more of a fanny pack I guess, but it served the purpose but then I just didn’t put it into the final design for the outfit ‘cause it just wasn’t my style, y’know? And anyway-”

Cass has listened to Ms. Marvel chatter about everything related to superheroes and superheroing under the sun for about ten minutes now. The girl still has not stopped to take a breath, and Cass finds this extremely amusing. More than that, however, she appreciates the girl’s endless stream of easy conversation. It makes her easy to be around, and easy to read. She doesn’t try to hide things - she illustrates her points with grand gestures and expressive emotions, doesn’t act stoic or silent. She is like an open book compared to the rest of Cass’s family, and it’s nice to meet someone in a mask that doesn’t try to bury everything they feel. 

“Oh my god, I’ve been talking for ages! Why didn’t you tell me to shut up?” 

Because this part of the city was uncomfortably quiet, and the noise made her less apprehensive. Instead, Cass shrugs. “It was nice.”

“...Nice,” echoes Ms. Marvel, looking genuinely shocked behind the blue lines of her mask. “That’s a...that’s a first.” a pause. “You are officially my favourite Bat,” she says decisively, and then strolls into the alley ahead of Cass. 

So she’s met others? That’s new information - she should check with the others before she reports back to Batman.

Ah, right. The recon mission. The report on JC she’s supposed to be building. Right.

“Ms. Marvel,” says Cass, trying to come up with a way to phrase her question properly.

“Hm?” replies Marvel, looking over her shoulder at Black Bat. She turns and leans against the wall next to her, waiting for Cass to continue. 

“I need your help,” she says carefully. “The Batman - is...worried about your city. He thinks... thinks that there is...” suspicious activity? Possible uptick in crime? “There  _ are _ ,” she self-corrects, “strange...things, happening in your city.” 

Marvel has her arms crossed across her chest, and she’s chewing her bottom lip as she listens to Cass attentively. “What kind of strange things?” she asks concernedly.

Cass opens her mouth to respond, but someone nearby shrieks loudly, and Ms. Marvel immediately drops her arms from her chest, going from  _ curious-concerned  _ to  _ worried-anxious-angry. _

“Did you hear that?” She doesn’t wait for a response, but immediately grows in size, towering above the three-storey buildings they stand between to look for the source of the scream. 

Cass barely has enough time to yank her hood on when Ms. Marvel plucks her clean off the ground and takes a giant step across the street. Two more steps and they see a frightened woman held at gunpoint by a figure in a hoodie, clutching her purse and shaking. The area is deserted, and the dim light from one the few working streetlights on the sidewalk illuminates the silver gleam of the gun in his fingers. 

“Ah-hem,” says Ms. Marvel, holding Cass aloft like a paper doll, with her free hand on her waist. She frowns at the mugger, and the sneer on his ugly face turns into horror as he looks up to see an angry sixteen-year-old the size of a small building glaring down at him. However, he’s still pointing the gun at the woman, so Black Bat taps Ms. Marvel’s oversized finger and gets set down in front of him. 

She knocks him onto his ass in three seconds with a few decisive punches after disarming him. As he whimpers he holds his hands out to deflect a hit from the advancing Black Bat. “If you do this again,” she hisses, “I  _ will _ find you. I will  _ make  _ you  _ hurt _ .” He scrambles away from her with a strangled sob, and flees the scene. 

“Dude,” says Ms. Marvel from behind her where she’s helping the lady up, “that was AWESOME. You gotta teach me how to do that.”

Cass shrugs noncommittally. “Sure.” 

* * *

They’re on a rooftop, closer to what Ms. Marvel labelled the ‘nice’ part of town. To Cass, after so long spent running around in the filth and horror of Gotham streets, it doesn’t look all that different to the ‘not-nice’ part of town. But, not her city, not her problem. She’s drilling Ms. Marvel on some basic punches, kicks and blocks, because it doesn’t look like she’s been given any sort of training. 

“Thumb outside fist. If your thumb is...tucked in, your fingers will be broken,” instructs Cass, folding Ms. Marvel’s hand correctly. “Kicks should be...sharp. Toes pointed, for most impact. Like this.”

They while away an hour or more as Cass gently corrects Ms. Marvel’s stance and form, showing her the most efficient way to take down a mugger or the easiest movements to disarm a gunman. At the end of it, Ms. Marvel flops down at the edge of the building, legs over the side, wiping the sweat from her forehead. Cass thinks if she was paler, her face would be fire-truck red. As it stands, she should be exhausted, but her whole demeanour screams  _ delighted _ .

“That,” breathes Ms. Marvel, “was  _ intense. _ I never really bothered with the whole fighting-training montage, y’know, what with the superpowers and all, but now I feel like,  _ uber _ -prepared to take on bad guys!” she says, grinning. Cass takes a seat next to her, crossing her legs soundlessly. “Usually I just get really big and threaten to step on people. It’s pretty fun.” She startles a bit when she realises Black Bat’s sitting next to her.

“You’re the coolest, you know that? You’re literally a ninja. How does someone move  _ that  _ quietly? Are you sure you don’t have like, shadow powers, or, like are you made of smoke? Are you a ghost, or like a fairy, or  _ ooh _ , a djinn, maybe? ‘Cause that-you’re  _ way  _ too quiet to be a human. I bet you’re like, secretly, a teleporter or something. Am I right?”

Cass tilts her head thoughtfully. “No,” she says with a half-smile. “Just Black Bat.”

Ms. Marvel grins at her. “I knew you’d say that!” Then her expression goes sober. “What were you saying about Batman and strange things, earlier? I never got to hear the rest of it.”

Right. Cass pulls out a small holo-projector from her utility belt and opens it up to show Ms. Marvel a detailed list of all the weird things that Bruce had compiled. She puts a finger to her bottom lip as she scans the reports, her eyes flicking across the blue screen with alarming speed. 

“Reports of green mist...Scarily long hair...increase in missing person cases...a giant hand saving people from the river...a surge in magic energy levels. Yeah, sounds about right for here,” she says, waving a hand dismissively. “Most of this is pretty explainable, but weird shit just... I don’t know, happens in JC. Probably the proximity to New York. Their weirdness tends to spill in every direction, and I guess we get quite a lot of the leftover trouble,” she says with a sigh. Cass doesn’t say anything. Just cocks her head curiously and waits for her to explain.

“Well, pff, I don’t know,” she says, leaning back onto the heels of her hands and staring at the deep blue sky. “Where do I begin? Uhhh, the hand. The hand was me. This girl named Zoe, she almost fell into the river ‘cause she was kinda tipsy and I saved her. And, uh, the mist... that was Terrigen Mist. Mild hallucinogenic-” she kinda waggles her fingers “-and activator of inhuman superpowers. And, uh,” she pauses, and blows a lock of hair out of her face exasperatedly. Cass silently thanks Lucius for mask-cams; she has  _ no  _ idea what Ms. Marvel’s talking about. “The long hair... That’s just Queen Medusa and her personal style. It’s pretty, right? But I can see why the length of it would freak you out, I mean..” she quirks an eyebrow at Cass’s ragged chin-length hair with a small smile. 

(So the lady was a queen, ergo, the weird building was a palace. Interesting.)

“I cut my own hair,” says Cass simply. 

“Mm. I can tell,” says Ms. Marvel. “Suits you, if we’re being honest. Very edgy-slash-badass.”

“Better for fighting.”

“Huh. Practical too, then.”

“Missing persons?” prompts Cass.

Marvel turns to face her. “Yeah, there was a whole bunch of people being kidnapped to be used as human batteries for this overly-complicated supervillain plot. The Inventor, he called himself. We got him in the end though, and everyone got out safe.” She pauses, narrowing her eyes. “He was a real jerk. Stupidly feathery, too.”

“Bird...villain?” asks Cass.

“Mm. Half-man, half-bird. All jerk,” says Ms. Marvel.

“Bird villains. Horrible,” agrees Cass sagely.

“You have ‘em too?” There’s a note of incredulousness in her voice.

“Court of Owls. Tried to...steal big brother. Also, blow up little brother. Hurt my...dad.” says Cass. 

“And you know, all this time, I thought more birds were more of a hero thing. Falcon, Hawkgirl, Hawkeye, Black Canary, even that girl on the Titans - Raven?”

She’s right, actually. “Robin,” adds Cass thoughtfully. “Nightwing. Red Robin, Hawk. Dove. Birds of Prey.” 

“Right??” exclaims Ms. Marvel. “But then there’s the Inventor, the Vulture, your Court of Owls, uh...wait, now I'm confused. Are birds more of a hero thing?”

“Think so,” says Cass, frowning. “Hm.”

* * *

“What about...Robins who smile?” asks Cass as they stroll into the IHOP.

Ms. Marvel looks confused. “What’s a...Robin that Smiles? Don’t they all smile? Isn’t that their thing?” 

They’ve been trying to come up with a list of bird-related supervillains the whole walk here because Ms. Marvel’s stomach had grumbled and she had said that she would like some pancakes, thank you very much. And Cass obviously wanted to finish getting the details for the report, but also, she would like to spend some more time with her new friend.

They’re shown to a table, and Cass tries to explain the Batman who Laughs and his Robins who Smile, but every word out of her mouth just makes Ms. Marvel cringe further in on herself. 

“Well, now I’m going to have nightmares for days. Thanks, Black Bat,” says Ms. Marvel. “Oh thank GOD,” she exclaims, as the server sets down their plates, “I’m gonna drown my fears in strawberry syrup. Watch.” She picks up the little bottle of strawberry syrup and then pours it all over her stack of pancakes, dyeing all of them a red-pink color. 

Cass opts for classic maple instead, and drizzles it daintily on before attacking her pile ferociously. Ms. Marvel actually stops eating to watch her, fork and knife held aloft, incredulous smile on her face. 

“What?” asks Cass, suspiciously. 

Her eyes widen. “Nothing! You, uh, you just reminded me. Of something, someone said once.”

“Hm.” Cass goes back to eating.

A few minutes later, she’s done, but Ms. Marvel still has a ways to go. “What about...magic surge?”

Ms. Marvel chews thoughtfully and swallows before answering. “Oh yeah. There was that thing with Loki on Valentine’s, and he cast a spell on the highschool. That’s probably what Batman’s talking about. Don’t worry, it’s like, a protection spell. Remember how I said New York spills over into JC? Yeah, this is one of those things. He was a villain before, but now he’s just annoying.”

“Hm.” 

Her comm crackles to life in her ear. “Black Bat, we need all hands on deck. Poison Ivy has escaped Arkham. Come back to Gotham as fast as possible.”

Cass stands up. “Have to go. Thank you, for the information.” 

“Oh, ohfay, no pwoblem dude,” says Ms. Marvel through a mouthful of pancakes. 

Cass places a couple of bills on the table. “For the food,” she says. 

“Thanks, for-um-for the fighting lesson! Oh, and the trip back here. Nice meeting you, Black Bat!” hollers Ms. Marvel at Cass’s retreating back. “Good luck with Gotham!”

Cass turns and smiles, genuinely smiles. Then she’s up and out, finding her way back to the Batplane. She calls Batman on the way there. 

“Black Bat, report. Situation in Jersey City?”

“Handled. No need to be our problem.”

“Hrm. You’re sure?”

Cass smiles. "Trust me. Not a problem."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you liked it! If you're getting tired of diner scenes, my sincerest apologies, but I'm probably just gonna keep writing them. I <3 diner scenes. 
> 
> kudos and comments are always appreciated!! leave me your thoughts below.
> 
> and hey? thanks.


	4. Tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At first glance, it doesn't really look like Red Robin and Ms. Marvel have much in common, apart from their love for alliteration. Take a second glance. No, really. I mean it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the promised Tim chapter!! For the sake of imagery pretend he's wearing his ugly Dr. Mid-Nite cowl (until he takes it off ofc), yeah? I liked the n52 showgirl wings as much as the next person, but I like to imagine that he busts the wings out for special occasions only. 
> 
> p.s. forgive me for any medical inaccuracies; I never was cut out to be a doctor ;P

Sometimes, people’s phones auto-correct his name from Tim to Time. Sometimes, when Dick text-spams him to take a break, and Tim (reluctantly) agrees, Dick will text him “good time :)” followed by “time*” and then “time*” and then “tim*. Sorry bbybird :P”.

Currently, with all the cursing he’s doing, Tim is neither being a Good Tim nor having a Good Time. He’s in an alley somewhere in south Jersey City, leaning against a dumpster, sitting in a puddle of garbage water. His ankle _hurts,_ and he is _tired_ , and if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s chasing after a guy who fled Gotham clutching a bag full of diamonds, he would very much like to take a nap. Preferably not here, but at this point, he’ll take what he can get. 

He tips his head back, hitting the dumpster with a dull _clang,_ and drags his hands down his face. It’s too hot here. It’s summer, and he’s sweating from having run across multiple rooftops, and his stupid leather cowl is pressure-cooking his brain slowly because this godforsaken place refuses to have any kind of breeze blowing. He sighs and yanks the cowl off because _what the hell_ , Red Robin isn’t exactly a household name when he’s this far away from Gotham; shouldn’t be a problem, no sir, he’ll be fine. He ignores the little shiver that runs down his spine when the air hits his face and takes a deep breath. His hair is dripping with sweat when it falls into his face and lets out a little groan because of all the times that he had to realize that Bruce was right about the haircut suggestion, it had to be this particular situation. He is so infinitely glad none of the others are here; they’d never let him live this down. 

He does put on his emergency domino mask before he gets up, though, because he values his secret identity and he’d like to keep it a secret, thank you very much. He makes sure all the edges are stuck tightly down before he hoists himself up, three, two, one and up he goes-AUGH that _hurts_ like a motherfreakin’ son of a BITCH. That...that’s not a good sign. He tries to recall the series of unfortunate events that landed him in this mess because he doesn’t remember destroying his ankle, but maybe it escaped his notice. 

It had been a regular Saturday night patrol in Gotham; Red Hood was in Crime Alley, Batman and Robin were doing a routine sweep of Robbinsville and the Bowery, and Tim was on Fashion District duty. Around 8:07 pm, Oracle had alerted him that an amateur jewelry thief had just fled after robbing a diamond emporium at gunpoint and was now headed on a path that would collide with Tim’s patrol route. Tim had summoned the R-cycle and chased the moron all the way out of Gotham, and because it was a slow night he had thought, might as well finish the job, right? At 1:16 am, he recalls speeding past a ‘Welcome to Jersey City’ sign, and then the thief had ditched the motorbike he was riding and taken to the rooftops instead. Unluckily for him, Red Robin was well versed in the art of parkour, and the chase continued on foot. That is, until he slipped on the edge of a building mid-jump and fell into the alley, caught his leg between the bars of a fire escape- _ohhh_ , that’s how that happened-and fell, ass-first, into a puddle (small lake) of garbage water. 

Yup, the others would have _never_ let this go. 

His ankle hurts, like, really, really, bad. But he’s miles from home and severely lacking any medical supplies other than some gauze and band-aids. He should’ve restocked his belt last night, and now it’s gonna cost him. Worst of all, he didn’t even get the guy. What a waste. 

He sighs and gets up again, this time making sure to avoid putting weight on his left ankle. He can feel the cold sweat run down his face as he swallows hard, trying to ignore the building pain. It doesn’t help that he can feel a headache building and that his hands are shaking a little (a _lot_ ). _Take a deep breath, Tim,_ he instructs himself, and then instantly regrets it when the rancid stench of rotting trash from an overflowing dumpster floods his nose. Willing himself to not fall over, he reaches for his grapple gun and shoots at the rooftop of the building next to him. Once he’s sure the line is secure, he retracts it and scrabbles onto the roof of the four-storey apartment - and promptly collapses into the inside corner of the roof’s boundary. 

It’s 1:39 am, according to his wrist-computer. He should just call the R-cycle and head on home. Maybe he can catch a few Zs on the way home if he sets it on autopilot. Why is an ankle injury hitting him so badly? He’s had worse. Way worse. So what if he’s tired and hungry and more than a little sleepy. He’s had worse. _Worse than a stupid ankle injury anyway_ , grumbles Tim under his breath. At least there’s a breeze up here, so it feels less like he’s marinating in his own sweat. Okay. Time to summon his favourite vehicle, so he can head on home and make it in time to fight with Damian over something completely arbitrary at breakfast. 

Except- the cycle’s not responding. Maybe it’s out of gas, or it’s out of range, or something’s interfering with the signal. Tim’s too tired to figure it out. Great. Now he’s gonna have to look for the cycle on foot, ‘cept one’s out of commission, and generally, people need two feet to shuffle around carrying on with their miserable lives. 

Tim’s life feels very miserable at the moment. 

Somehow it gets worse. 

For context, the building he’s on is on a street corner. He’s currently looking at a main street that runs perpendicular to the one his building’s main door is on. This street that he can see has a row of storefronts advertising various things - like, there’s a bike shop, and an old-timey tailor’s, and an antique bookstore, silent and undisturbed, the way you’d expect them to be at this hour. However, all of this peace and quiet goes to shit when the darkened jewelry store starts blaring an alarm, and it takes everything Tim has left to stand up shakily and squint through the lenses of the domino to see that- _holyshitit’sthesameguyfrombefore?!_

Tim would be exasperated, except he doesn’t have the energy. He is, however, impressed at the sheer _courage_ of this moron, that despite being chased by a legit vigilante all the way to another city, he decided that the best course of action was to steal more precious stones. Apparently, the words ‘low profile’ don’t mean anything to Jersey City criminals. Or ‘common sense’, or ‘a plan’ or even just ‘thinking’, lists Tim’s brain unhelpfully. 

Tim hobbles along to the other edge of the building’s roof. If he can grapple across the street, he can land squarely in the middle of the road and cut the guy off before he gets too far. He shoots and jumps, and lands right where he hoped he would, pain from his busted leg notwithstanding. He wishes the world would stop swaying for five goddamn seconds so he could get his bearings before- the moron pulls out his gun and points it at Tim. 

Tim sighs and extends his bo staff.

“I don’t wanna hurt ya, kid! Go home, forget ya ever saw this here thing happen,” hollers the guy. He’s wearing a ski mask, but Tim knows he’s smirking in that dumb way that criminals do when they think they’re free to go cause Batman’s not around. He doesn’t rise to the bait, he just stands there gritting his teeth and trying to come up with a plan that involves him moving as little as possible. Then out of the corner of his eye, he sees something moving in the distance. A red-and-blue smudge at the end of the street. Is he hallucinating now?

“Wait a second, hold up, what’s that?” asks Tim, squinting and pointing behind the crook. 

Criminal dude snorts. “Nice try, kid, but you think I’m gonna fall for the oldest trick in the book?”

The red-and-blue shape is getting closer. “Seriously!” he yells, gesturing harder. “Look behind you! It’s a... _superhero_?” he trails off, because there’s really...no other way to put it. There’s a girl walking towards them, and she’s dressed brightly in Superman’s colors?! Blue dress-thing, red tights and scarf, and a giant lightning bolt in bright yellow on the dress-thing that’s visible even in the dim lamplight.

The crook crosses his arms and rolls his eyes. “Speak up, kid. Couldn’t hear that last part over the sound of your skinny ass letting me leave with all of these diamonds,” he grins, and Tim can make out a gold tooth glinting in the moonlight. 

“Maybe he’ll let you go, but I sure as hell won’t,” rings out a female voice from behind them, and before Goldtooth can even react, a giant hand swoops in and picks him clean off the ground and holds him upside down between forefinger and thumb. 

Oh yeah, Tim forgot to mention: the brightly-colored lightning bolt girl was also sixty feet tall. 

* * *

Lightning Lady makes quick work of the thief. Once she’s freaked him out a bit by shaking him and laughing in front of his face, she stretches ( _stretches?!_ ) her arm over several blocks to where a police car is racing down the street, and once Goldtooth is safely in their custody, she shrinks back down to normal size. Tim is relieved to know that this girl is actually 5 4”, and that Jersey City was not home to a giant sixteen-year-old. (He remembers being sixteen. Granted, it was only a few months ago, but the temptation to play Godzilla would have overcome every other instinct he had.)

Through all of this, Tim is still standing (read: leaning heavily on his staff) in the middle of the road, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. Bruce kept tabs on most active metas, but Tim doesn’t remember reading anything about a stretchy meta in the Jersey area. Which is weird, but also understandable, seeing as she doesn’t really seem like a threat. Then again, nothing is as it seems so best to stay wary, he reminds himself. 

The meta in question strides forward and offers her hand in greeting. “Hiya,” she says, smiling brightly. The colors in her uniform make his head pound harder. “Welcome to Jersey City, Mr...?”

“Red Robin. Nice to meet you.”

She loses her smile almost immediately, and it’s replaced with the most incredulous look he’s ever seen on anyone, ever. Kinda reminds him of Duke when he walked in on a Wayne Family Food Fight Extraordinaire a couple of Sundays ago.

“Like...the burgers?” she says, confusion coloring her tone. 

Tim sighs. “Yes. Like the burgers. And I didn’t catch your name?”

“I’m Ms. Marvel. Aren’t you worried about the lawsuit?”

Marvel. Maaaarvel. Marveeeeeel. Mar-vel. Tim’s too busy trying to figure out why Ms. Marvel sounds familiar to answer her question when it finally clicks. “Marvel? Marvel like Captain Marvel- wait a second, didn’t she used to be called Ms. Marvel? But your outfit looks nothing like her old one- _Woah,_ ” he has to abandon that train of thought half-way as he fights the wave of nausea rolling in his stomach, threatening to make him throw up the sandwich he’d had as a pre-patrol snack several hours ago. In his excitement at meeting the knock-off Marvel, he’d taken a step with his bad leg and _oh boy_ did that _hurt_ and now the street had apparently decided to execute a perfect pirouette, or maybe that was just Tim. 

Ms. Marvel watches him concernedly as he tries to keep himself upright by using his staff (tries and _fails_ ), hands slipping down the sleek chrome exterior. “You okay?” she says, eyebrows scrunching behind her mask. “You don’t look so good, Burger Boy.” 

“I’m-I’m fine,” Tim manages to gasp out. This does absolutely nothing to appease Ms. Marvel’s concern, and somehow just makes her more visibly nervous. She reaches out to steady him because he was swaying a little bit (so that hadn’t just been an earthquake occurring for the past ten minutes, apparently) and bites her lip. “Dude. You’re clearly not fine. But you have to tell me what’s wrong so I can help you, yeah?”

Tim recognizes the voice she’s using. It’s the same voice Dick uses on Damian to get him to open up about his feelings. He’s about to protest being treated like a child, but then the pain gets the better of him. “Busted-busted my ankle,” he manages to grit out, keeping his eyes closed and tightening his grip on the staff. 

Ms. Marvel squares her shoulders. “Right,” she says. “You’re a seasoned vigilante; you know how to fix it temporarily until you get back to Gotham, right?”

Tim sets his jaw and nods a little bit, trying to tune out the pain. 

Ms. Marvel claps her hands once. “Okay then. On the count of three, I’m going to pick you up and put you onto the sidewalk, okay? Then we can examine the injury and you can tell me what to go pick up from the pharmacy that's near here, hmm? Okay. Three, two, one- ” and Tim is gently scooped off the ground and set down a few feet to the left. When he dares to open his eyes again, he’s lying on the sidewalk as Ms. Marvel crouches next to him, easing off his boot. She cringes when she sees Tim’s ankle. It’s not too bad, just looks like a nasty sprain. Tim can walk it off, no problem, but since the last time he tried he nearly passed out, he decides not to try moving. 

“Okay, so, Red Robin. What are you going to need to fix this?” 

“Splinting supplies- just ask them for stuff to splint an ankle.”

Ms. Marvel nods, and gets up. “Don’t go anywhere! I’ll be right back,” she says, getting up and getting - _big_ , Tim notes with a hazy sense of awe. 

“Don’ go ‘nywhere, she says. Where’mi gon’ go with m’stroyed’nkle?” he grumbles under his breath, watching her retreating back and he sits propped up on his elbows. 

Tim’s pretty sure he falls asleep on the sidewalk waiting for her to come marching back with his stuff, because the ground is nice and cold and very comfy by concrete standards, was all the sidewalk in Jersey City this nice? Because he knew first-hand that the Gotham sidewalks were nowhere near as nice. 

When she gets back, Tim wakes up with a jolt to her shaking his shoulder. “Hey. Hey! Red Robin! Get up, I got your stuff.”

Tim lets out a very intelligent “Huh? Wha’zzgoinon?” in response. 

Ms. Marvel squints at him. “This isn’t just from the ankle, is it?” she says. Then, completely unprompted, she leans forward and places a disturbingly cold hand on his forehead. Her eyes widen, and she snaps her hand back like she’s been burnt. 

“Red- you’re burning up. Definitely have a fever. Is this the flu, or something worse?”

Tim stops to consider his symptoms. He has a headache, and he’s feeling dizzy and nauseous, but no cough and no cold. Probably a result of pulling three all-nighters in a row, coupled with a lack of water...aaaand the ankle probably wasn’t helping. Hopefully it’s not something worse; Tim isn’t exactly the best at fighting off infections after the extremely regrettable loss of his spleen. 

“No,” says Tim weakly, shaking his head. “‘S not the flu. ‘M jus’ very very tired.”

Ms. Marvel is still eyeing him concernedly. “You still need something to reduce the fever though. If you can manage the splint by yourself, I can double back and get you some ibuprofen? I’m no doctor, but that should probably work.” She’s worrying her bottom lip with a vengeance, and the idea that she’s completely out of her depth rises up unbidden from the pain-riddled corners of his mind. He tries to go for a smile, but it comes out a grimace, probably. 

“Don’ worry, m’kay?’ve got this,” he says, waving her off dismissively. She sets her jaw determinedly and nods once, hesitating. “I’ll be fine, promise.” She squints at him like she doesn’t believe him. “Don’t fall asleep again, Burger Boy,” she warns, before running down the street back towards the pharmacy. 

The wrist-computer says 1:57 am. Time to fix his ankle, he supposes, and slowly props himself up, ignoring the dizziness that threatens to throw him down like that time Killer Croc body-slammed him into the sewage-aaaand he’s getting nauseous just thinking about it. 1:59 am. _Get up_ , he says to himself. _You gotta do this. Gotta fix your ankle, and then she’ll come back with the painkillers, and then you can be on your way._

So, sweating and shaking, he sits up and scrubs at his face. _You can do this,_ says a voice in his head. It sounds suspiciously like Dick, but who is he to refuse brotherly encouragement when he needs it most?

* * *

By the time he’s done wrapping up his ankle, Ms. Marvel’s back with a distinctive pink box of Advil and a bottled water. She smiles a tad awkwardly as she looks down at him, and Tim thinks that’s pretty understandable. What a sight he must look, drenched in sweat and shivering, pale and weak in the moonlight. He makes grabby hands at the box and she laughs, but pulls her hand back.

“I was going to get you Motrin, but then I remembered Mr. Stark complaining about it being ‘menstruation medicine’ and- hey, hey, you with me? Red-” she leans forward to catch him before he falls back completely and cracks his head open on the sidewalk. He grips her arm gratefully as she hauls him upright and drags him over to lean on the wall. 

“This is going from bad to worse, isn’t it. Look, Red, before I give you this, you gotta tell me if you’ve eaten something in the past few hours. It’s ibuprofen, and I don’t wanna send you home with like, stomach ulcers or something,” she says, kneeling in front of him with a serious look on her face. 

Tim lets out what he’s pretty sure is a whine, but he’s in too much pain to stop it. “I know dude, I know, but I’m sorry. You’re in bad enough shape as it is, I’m not gonna be the reason you end up in more pain,” she says, patting his arm sympathetically. The sentiment is sweet, but Tim thinks he would appreciate it more if he wasn’t somehow freezing and boiling at the same time.

She doesn’t seem to get that, though, as she ignores his pleading face. “Well? Have you?”

Tim shakes his head sullenly. 

“O-kay then. We-” she gets up and sighs,”-are gonna have to get you something to eat. Hmm.”

Tim looks up at her blearily through the white-outs of his mask, blinking tiredly. She looks back at him and a short laugh escapes her mouth. Probably nerves. “Gourmet options are kinda limited, considering the time. We’ll just have to stop at a supermarket and see if they’ve got anything.” She passes him the water, and Tim can see the moment where she stops herself from tossing it at him and instead hands it to him gently. “Take a sip if you need to, but try not to throw up when I pick you up, okay?”

“Wait, wha-” he snaps his mouth shut as Ms. Marvel grows to the size of a small apartment building and scoops him up in one of her palms. His eyes are screwed shut in an effort to lessen the effect of the lurch in his stomach at the sudden movement. “Where-where are we going,” he gasps desperately, and Ms. Marvel peers down at him sympathetically. 

“Grocery store two blocks from here, okay? Please don’t puke in my hand. And hold on tight,” she says, and she starts moving.

* * *

The trip wasn’t too bad. Ms. Marvel’s palm is blessedly puke-free, and she managed to get Tim to the grocery store in one piece. They picked up a packet of saltines and some more water, and then Tim was plucked off the ground and placed gently behind a large light-up sign attached to the front of a building. Even through the haze of the fever and the pain from his ankle (although lessened now, thanks to the splint) the shape of the letters seems oddly familia- _oh._

Tim scowls up as best as he can at a sheepish Ms. Marvel, who’s watching him with a guiltily-amused expression on her face. “Sorry,” she giggles. “Couldn’t help myself, Red Robin. I’d uh, I’d take you inside for a burger, but. Um. I don’t think they’re open just yet,” she grins and Tim huffs. 

“Anyway. Eat your saltines, so we can get you home.” 

This is the hard part. He would, he really would, but even the thought of putting something near his mouth makes him want to hurl. The worst part is he’s actually starving; but the combination of sweat and garbage-water he can smell off himself is making him feel sick. How is Ms. Marvel still here, standing only a foot and a half away from him? Even if he wasn’t sick, the stench would have probably made him regurgitate whatever he’d eaten that particular night. 

Ms. Marvel grimaces. “You can’t get your mind off the smell, can you?” she asks, dropping down cross-legged next to him. She smiles and wrinkles her nose a bit, so Tim knows for a fact that she’s got a working sense of smell; she’s just being kind. “Yeah, you stink something awful, dude,” she says conversationally to the blank expression he gives her, “but I’ve smelt worse.” He raises an eyebrow, and she shrugs. “This isn’t so bad - if you know what my hometown smells like during _bakraeid_ , that is,” she states matter-of-factly and then refuses to clarify exactly where she’s from or what the hell BakraWeed is. 

Tim still refuses to pick up the crackers because he doesn’t want the taste of bile mixing with the particular flavour of sleep-mouth he’s sporting. The water is a no-go too, so he sits there and regards the supplies, feeling queasy. Ms. Marvel seems to be tiring of this, because she mutters “right.” under her breath and crawls until she’s sitting directly opposite him. 

“How about we play a game?” she suggests, crossing her legs as she seats herself on the cold concrete. “You Bat-Birds love information, right? Always asking questions and the like. I bet you have a bunch of questions for me, dont’cha?”

Tim frowns. How does she know about the Bats and their investigative tendencies?

“So here’s what we’ll do. You can ask me questions, and for every question you have to eat a cracker. When you’re done with half the packet, that’s what, like, nine crackers? I’ll give you the Advil. The questions will keep you distracted from your current...situation, and then you can get home ASAP. Deal?”

Tim wants to protest- he’s not a baby! He doesn’t need to play ridiculous games to eat his food, this was literally a verbal version of _Here Comes the Airplane!_ but also, he has to eat these crackers at some point, and if she’s offering information about herself... His wrist glows a bright green 2:32 in the darkness, and he sighs. 

“Fine.” His concession has Ms. Marvel lighting up as she tears open the packet, handing him one. 

Here goes nothing. _Crunch._ “How’d you get your powers?”

Ms. Marvel hums. “Terrigen Mist, if that means anything to you.”

“It doesn’t. Elaborate?”

“Fine, but that’s another question. Eat your cracker,” she says, handing him another one. 

Tim sighs. Another audible _crunch_ permeates the silence. He chews slowly, the slight saltiness acting as a deterrent to the more nauseating pre-existing taste marinating in his mouth. 

Ms. Marvel takes her sweet time answering. “You know the city-wide gassing that happened a while back? Your Batman knows of it - that was the Terrigen Mist. Activated latent superpowers.”

Tim swallows the cracker. “So you _are_ a meta. Huh. Last I heard, meta-traffickers were using sludge to activate powers, and individually too. If they got their hands on this- this mist you’re talking about, this could spell disaster for kids everywhere.” 

Ms. Marvel shakes her head, her lips a straight line. “Look, it’s not a problem. Trust me. The Terrigen Cells were activated once and only once, and not by a hostile party. They aren’t a problem.”

Tim highly doubts this. “How can you be sure?” Ms. Marvel hands him another cracker, and Tim reluctantly shoves it in his mouth. 

“Look, trust me when I say this - the incident happened ages ago. You’re not going to find anything, especially not in Gotham. The mist wasn’t made by evil scientists, and it doesn’t activate powers the way you’re thinking. You can call me a metahuman, sure, but I’m not the same kind as the Flashes or Black Canary. My genetics are...different.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “Different _how_?” Another cracker. Ms. Marvel sighs.

“I’m not at liberty to say. Gosh, this is turning out to be a real pain in my ass. Don’t make me regret helping you, Burger Boy.”

Tim rolls his eyes behind the mask, and she snorts. “Quit it. Next question?”

“Why are you so bad at first aid?”

“Hey! I saved your ungrateful ass back there, don’t sass me,” she says indignantly. At Tim’s curious stare, she sighs. 

“Healing factor,” she answers, waggling her fingers. “So long as I’m not shapeshifting, I can heal like-” she snaps her fingers “-that! First aid isn't really an issue, y’know? Next question, Double R.”

He pauses. “Why is your accent so... not-Jersey?”

Ms. Marvel snorts, rolls her eyes, and hands him a saltine. “You try being non-Caucasian and having exposure to, like, ten billion accents a day and coming out with anything but unidentifiable-but-most-definitely-American. Also-” she jabs a thumb over her shoulder “-we’re right on the border, dude, it’s not like I’m gonna sound like your inner-city mobsters or anything.”

Tim squints past her comically. “Are you _sure_ that’s where New York is,” he asks. Ms. Marvel only responds by shrugging and grabbing his hand and placing another cracker in it, which he proceeds to regard with dismay. “Does it matter? Made ya eat. Now ask me something else, quick, so we can blow this popsicle stand.”

He swallows the cracker thoughtfully, and tries to remember how many questions he has left. What to ask? Why did fevers have to fry your brain so bad? 

He settles for “Why is your outfit so different to the original Ms. Marvel get-up? Powers too?” 

“That’s your last two questions, so here ya go-” ( _dammit!_ ) she slaps two saltines into his open palm “-eat ‘em, and I’ll answer.” A _crunch-crunch_ later, she explains. “You’ve obviously...seen the previous incarnation of the outfit and maybe it worked for her, but I needed something different. Kept the lightning bolt, though, and the flowing sash-type design. As for my powers - different circumstances, different powers. Captain Marvel’s my hero, and she always has been. I guess I just styled myself after her because I wanted to be all the good things that she is, y’know?”

Tim...can relate. “Aren’t you...afraid of the legacy?” 

Ms. Marvel cocks her head at him curiously, tucking her dark hair behind her ear to stop it falling in her face. “What do you mean?” she asks, handing him the Advil and the water.

He doesn’t answer, looking around as he tries to fit his thoughts into coherent sentences, the water bottle twisting in his hands. “Like. Hm. Like-like Ms. Marvel’s got a long history,” he says lamely, and she nods, her eyebrows drawing together. “People...expect things from her. There’s a standard she’s held to, a way of doing things... the precedent she set,” he says, biting his lip. “Aren’t you afraid that you’re never gonna be good enough to wear the r- the lightning bolt?”

She’s got this knowing look on her face, and Tim’s just now realising that maybe he wasn’t as nonchalant in his asking as he thought he was. 

“Well,” she says slowly, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them, “I’m not going to be her. Not now, not ever. Hell, I don’t even look anything like her, if you hadn’t noticed already.” She gestures to her face with a sarcastic smile, and Tim gets it. 

“Just because I have her name, doesn’t mean I have to... _be_ her. I didn’t even really ask for permission to use the name, it just kinda sorta happened. I’m not her. I’m me. When people hear the name ‘Ms. Marvel’ and I show up, maybe it’s not what they were expecting. But I’m trying to bring about the same kind of good in the world that she was, and isn’t that really what a legacy is? Taking the path that someone’s trying to forge and carrying it forward - maybe in a different path, but in the same direction?”

Her words echo in his brain, the sound reverberating in his soul. _Different path, same direction._ Huh. 

“Can I ask you a question?” she says, looking over at him curiously.

“Sure. Shoot,” replies Tim. He swallows the pills while she gathers her thoughts, and waits for her query. 

“Why’d you pick Red Robin as your name? Copyright issues aside for the moment,” she says with a grin, “isn’t there already a Robin in Gotham?”

Ah. A hard question. 

Tim had absolutely no intention to have a heartfelt conversation with this girl. He didn’t, okay? But it’s almost three in the morning. His head hurts. She just force-fed him saltines and he almost puked in her hand. Maybe he’s sort of attached to this... Ms. Marvel, with her kind smile and her well-meaning taunts and genuine words of comfort. 

Best to start at the beginning, he thinks.

“I...I used to be Robin,” he announces, not meeting her eyes. 

Ms. Marvel snorts. “No shit, Red.”

“How did you know?” asks Tim, confused. “You’re not a Gothamite.” 

She rolls her eyes and smiles. “You have the same vibe as Robin-three-but-also-five. Also, the both of you stand the same way, and according to the Reddit forums, you’re the first Robin to not have been quippy. You’re more of a dry-humour kinda guy, which I can appreciate.”

Tim sighs. Anyway. “I used to be Robin, and it was a good time, y’know? I kinda- I stepped into the role, and I didn’t _really_ ask permission from the original Robin, but he didn’t mind, kind of like with you and your Captain.” Ms. Marvel nods, listening attentively. 

“Then... we all kind of went through something big, a few years ago, and I had to- well, I stopped being- I-...hmf,” he huffs. Ms. Marvel watches him, her eyes squinting. 

“The change in Batmen? That was when Sword-Robin made his debut, too, so..?” she says, the end of her sentence lilting up like a question. 

Tim nods. “Ah- yeah. Sword-Robin, different Batman, all that. You know-” he says, his voice breaking slightly, “he kept going on about how he was the better Robin, more worthy of the role. Guess Di-Batman thought that too, because he- he took it, and gave it to Sword Robin, even though I wasn’t ready to let it go. And-I- I was working a case by myself for a long while, and well, I didn’t know who I was once it was over. Red Robin isn’t even really who I wanted to be, it was just- it just sorta happened. Guess... I just wasn't ready to let go of it completely, yet.”

Ms. Marvel tucks her knees under her chin and looks at him pensively. 

“I was so- I was so proud to be Robin,” he says, not acknowledging the lump in his throat. “The legacy was almost impossible to live up to, an unachievable standard, but I think I would’ve died trying to, would’ve died happy trying to live up to it.” Her face immediately takes on a shocked expression, eyes open wide, eyebrows scrunched up, mouth scowling. “Robin was my everything. I didn’t want to have to give it up, and now I’m just stuck looking like a half-and-half copy of Red Hood and Robin. For a while, I thought maybe this would be a good thing. I could be my own man, my own hero, but people just look at me like I’m a- I’m not what they wanted to see.” His eyes are watering behind the white-outs of his mask now, and he is gonna blame the fever for this because he was over this. He was. Bruce had come back and Dick and him were good and Damian hadn’t tried to kill him in ages, so he was fine. He was. He had to be.

She doesn’t seem to think so. She stretches one leg out, still holding the other under her chin. The wind ruffles her dark hair and her red scarf, and Tim shivers. “Look,” she says, her dark eyes solemn but understanding. “I get it. You feel second-rate, like nothing you do can ever match up, or compare. I get it. Borrowed my name from someone much more powerful, living and working in a city that gets no recognition, fighting a fight that sometimes makes me feel like I’m the only one left on the front lines. 

“Our mentors...they do things that we may not agree with, maybe aren’t even always in our best interests. I bet they’re trying, double R, because they’re the kinds of good people who try to do the right thing. But that’s the thing. They’re just...people. You can’t always count on them to be right, because sometimes...when you’re picking sides, you might just end up playing fielder to their batsmen.” She pauses, taking a deep breath.

“I know what it feels like, to be going off alone, to oppose the person you look up to more than anything,” she says, fingers drumming on her knee. “But sometimes standing alone is okay. Sometimes...you just gotta make your own legacy. Build your own thing. Maybe you won’t have the power and the reputation that you might’ve had with a hand-me-down identity, but doing your own thing- doing things your way- will leave you a lot freer than dying for someone else’s legacy, dude. Make it so when you put on your uniform you don’t need to answer to someone else’s image. Do good _your_ way. Live by your own rules. Die on your own terms. Don’t throw away your life to show everyone else what they want to see. You’re-you’re worth more than that, more than being an homage to someone else’s story.”

For a brightly-colored teenager who seems to be younger than him, she’s got some pretty solid advice. He swipes at his eyes surreptitiously. “And hey,” she says, smiling mischievously. “ _Some_ body’s gotta stick it to the old people, right? How else are we gonna keep them humble if not by carving our own legacies?”

Tim can’t help it. He laughs, and maybe it’s the meds kicking in, but for the first time in a while he feels a lot better. “That’s some pep talk. You give a lot of these speeches?” he asks wetly. 

She just shakes her head. “I get that from Captain America. The dude just comes up with these on the fly, and they’re _juuuust_ this side of cheesy but they are also _the_ most inspiring pep talks you’ll ever hear. I’ll sneak you into an Avengers meeting sometime. He usually ends with ‘em,” she muses absently. “Come on,” she says, getting up and offering her hand. “Let’s go return you to your beloved hometown before they send a search party for you.”

Tim grabs her hand, and she yanks him up in one smooth motion. The world starts spinning again, and he squeezes his eyes closed until it stops. 

“You can’t walk, can you,” she sighs. “Right.”

* * *

In the end, Tim’s watch reads 3:58 am when they finally stumble across his abandoned R-cycle in a shadowed alley not far from where he’d busted his ankle. Part of the reason it took so long was because despite the medicine, Red Robin was still in no shape to go trudging around a strange city alone, so Ms. Marvel had taken the liberty of retracing their steps while he shouted instructions from her palm. 

The other part was because while Tim may be an absolute genius at many things, identifying random street corners by moonlight was not one of his skills, so naturally it took a fair amount of time before they were able to get back to the spot. 

“So how _are_ you avoiding being sued for the name?” she had asked, as they were backtracking through yet another street because Tim had said to _take a left, no, no, my left!_ and now he was pretty sure he should’ve said right instead. He’s getting sleepier every second, and he personally would like to think that this means that he’s no longer responsible for the words that come out of his mouth. He’s wrong, of course, but that doesn’t stop his brain from removing the thought-to-speech filter it usually employs, and so he responds with: “How’re they gonna sue me? I own _aaaaall_ of th'Re-Robins...” voice slurring with sleep. 

To her credit, Ms. Marvel doesn’t react as strongly as she could have. “You should add more vegetarian options to the menu, then,” she replies evenly. Tim nods. “Demon-” he yawns loudly, and he thinks he hears something crack “-Demon-Bird’d prob’ly like that too,” he declares. 

When they finally do find the motorcycle, Tim hits the autopilot function and sets it to take him home. He makes sure he’s wearing the seatbelt that was installed for this very purpose, so that he does not turn into a road-pancake this fine morning. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to catch some sleep on the way home and hopefully wake up a freshly-brewed pot of Alfred’s coffee. It’s Sunday, right? That means Steph is gonna want to go out for lunch, and that he’s got a bit of WE work that needs doing, and...

“-sure you won’t fall off this thing, right?” Ms. Marvel’s looking at him concernedly. 

“Oh, yeah,” says Tim. “I’ll be fine.” Ms. Marvel suddenly claps her hands onto his shoulders and looks into his white-out lenses with a strange ferocity, and Tim is jolted awake.

“Hey. Think about what I said, okay? You can keep being Red Robin if you want, or pick another bird from the aviary since you people love your flying animals theme, but do what _you_ wanna do, okay?”

Her grip on his shoulders is terrifyingly strong, but her eyes just scream with concern for him. It’s nice to be cared about this way for a change, he thinks. 

“Thanks,” he says, smiling tiredly. “See you around, Ms. Marvel.”

“Bye-bye, Burger Boy,” she grins, and gives him a little half-salute before he speeds away.

* * *

When Tim wakes up in front of Wayne Manor, he’s still strapped into his cycle-seat, and his wrist-computer reads 5:27 am. He’s almost inclined to dismiss the whole thing as a strange dream, but then he looks down and sees the splint on his leg, and _oh shit_ he straight up cried about his problems with a total stranger...a total stranger that can grow to the size of a small building. Wow.

Time to open up a secret file on his new super-friend, he muses, watching the sun rise into a brightening sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tony, upon seeing the motrin: i'M nOt oN mY cYcLe pEpPeR!
> 
> Hope you enjoyed that! kudos and comments are always appreciated <3.
> 
> and hey. thanks.


	5. Stephanie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remember that girls' trip Steph was annoyed she couldn't take with Cass? She winds up in Jersey City anyway, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've decided it would be criminal not to give Cass a cameo in Steph's chapter, because they are Best Friends and I will die before I believe otherwise. enjoy!

Stephanie Brown absently twirls a purple earbud between her forefinger and thumb of her left hand as she sits in the late afternoon sunshine, reading a glossy pamphlet under the shade of a large tree. Music buzzes through the tiny speaker as her eyes trail down the page, seeing the words but not taking them in. 

She looks up from her page and from her position in the grass she can see a group of people joking as they walk down a path towards an ancient brick building, some holding books and others shouldering bags. A girl strolls by in the opposite direction, talking loudly on her phone about some dude named Mark and how much she hates him. On a bench not too far from her sits a guy fully absorbed in what appears to be a physics textbook, only pausing to highlight a couple of sentences here or there or scribble something furiously in the margins. 

The air is a little humid, and she has never before been so glad to be wearing a dress because at least this means she won’t have to peel a t-shirt off her sticky arms when she gets back to her room. She does appreciate the breeze though, and the way the sun casts the whole campus in a soft golden glow, the buttery warmth lulling her to sleep. 

It’s a beautiful college, she thinks, staring at the red-brick walls and the white roof in the distance that are so vivid against the green of the grounds and the trees surrounding it. The best part is that there aren’t any screams in the background, no memorial plaques to those killed in Joker attacks or Scarecrow’s little “experiments”. Just a nice, ordinary university with a good undergrad program and well-maintained dorms and a library that smells like old books and dust. 

The pamphlet says it wouldn’t be hard to transfer; she’s not even in a different state, and she’s only done one year at Gotham City University, and she has a whole month before the fall semester starts. She definitely wouldn’t have any trouble packing up and moving here, and the tuition was not much higher than GCU’s... Her mother would definitely support her decision - anything for Steph to make a life for herself outside of Gotham. She can almost picture herself building a life here, waking up every morning to go to Bio 101, making friends, and finding new coffee shops in town, and studying in that big library near those gorgeous windows, and just... _living_. 

It makes her almost dizzy with longing.

She gets up from her spot and makes her way to the main gate; from there, she summons an Uber and is on her way back to the cheap little hotel she’d been staying in while she was here for the weekend. The interior of the car smells like old perfume and gasoline, and the driver’s got a pine-tree air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror upfront. As the car bumps along the road, she finds herself mesmerized by the swaying of the little scented tree-replica. Makes her think of all the Scooby-Doo she’d watched as a kid, with those evil hypnotists and their shiny golden watches. She could use a good hypnotist right about now; maybe they could hypnotise her into making good choices.

The sun is almost about to set by the time the car drops her off in front of the her hotel, and Steph watches the sky blend into a vibrant gradient of highlighter-ish shades of pink and purple, the deep violet leeching into a faded blue as the sun makes its descent below the horizon. The almost-full moon glows brightly overhead, and if she squints, she can make out the little spots on its face - what were they called? Sunspots were on the sun, and the moon had... Pores? Acne? That doesn’t sound quite right. She takes the revolving door in, and the lady sitting at the reception and smacking her gum loudly nods at her as she walks to the stairwell. Gashes? Rifts?

It’s a long flight of stairs, but Steph barely notices it as her mind churns over the various names for the poor moon’s skin condition. 

Cavities? _Step._ Ruptures? _Step._ Orifices...? _Step._ Before she knows it, she’s reached the seventh floor, unlocked room 703 and collapsed on the bed. She watches the fan spin lazily above her, going round and round with that weird buzzing in the background, and the sound of her neighbours yelling at each other from behind their thin walls mixes with the general din of the city that streams in through her open window. The temptation to Google the answer to her unanswerable question is nearly-impossible to fight... her phone is _right there_ in the cute purple case Damian had shoved into her hands as a birthday present last year. Two taps and she would know exactly what lunar zits are actually called... _must...resist..._

She picks it up anyway, though, because it starts playing that obnoxious Top40 song that Cass had picked out for her ringtone, and indeed, it _is_ Cass, video calling her all the way from Gotham City. She hits Accept and holds her phone above her as she lays on the bed, Cass frowning down at her from the tiny screen. Steph just grins and waves with her free hand. 

“Where. Are. You.” Each word is punctuated with a solid fullstop, and Steph can almost feel Cass’s annoyance through the phone.

“Not there?” she offers sheepishly, racking her brain to try and think why Cass would be so upse- _oh no_. 

Cass’s face morphs into something more sad, and she holds up a DVD box. “Girls’ night. You promised - first weekend after Hong Kong.” Shit. Steph was an awful best friend. Cass had been away for almost a month or so, and they hadn’t been able to hang out for quite a while - Steph had exams, and then Cass had been working the cartel case with Jason, and then there had been that week that Steph had been benched because she’d dislocated her shoulder, and then Cass had left. Girls’ night had been sidelined since summer had started which was a shame, because it was usually the part of her week that she looked forward to the most. Since she’d become Spoiler again, she’d kind of been working solo once more, and that meant fewer and fewer interactions with the Waynes outside of criss-crossing patrol routes, which kind of sucked, but whatever. She was used to her life sucking quite a bit every now and then. 

She looks off to the side guiltily, dragging her hand down her cheek. “I’ll make it up to you. Swear. Cross my heart ‘n hope to die,” she says, miming the actions that accompanied the promise.

Cass considers this. “Where are you?” is her reply, although softer this time. 

Steph sighs. She really, _really,_ doesn’t want to tell Cass. Don’t get her wrong, she adores Cass, but she hasn’t told _anyone_ what she's considering _._ She barely even explained where she was going to Mom, and no way in hell is she telling Tim or Barbara until she’s a hundred percent on what she wants to do. 

Cass...doesn’t do well with change. It comes with being the daughter of Batman and also having had everything throughout your life change too rapidly all the time without your permission - making it so that any change now (when things feel secure) is akin to personal betrayal. Steph isn’t completely sure that she’s moving, but she’s not sure she has it in her to stay in Gotham any longer and if this dilemma was giving her a stomachache, then to Cass it’d be like a poison dart to the heart.

So Steph lies. This is a risk you cannot take in person with Cass, but lucky for her, she has a little function called ‘reverse camera’ on her side. Whoops-a-daisy! The phone is now only transmitting the image of her fan going at Mach -7.

“I went to Jersey City.” Okay, so she’s not lying about that part. But for the inevitable “why?” that follows, she’s going to have to fudge her explanation a bit. Cass blinks at her, dark eyes unreadable, waiting for a justification. “Mom has a friend here who kept all her books from med school. She said she’d give them to me, and you know how expensive textbooks are. She was only free this weekend, and I wanted to go as soon as possible, you know?”

Cass nods, her silky black hair falling into her face. “Your camera.” 

“Oh. Whoops. Must’ve hit it by accident,” says Steph. She flips it back and smiles apologetically at Cass. “Look. Because I’m a shit friend, you and I can spar when I get back. Will kicking my ass help you forgive me?” She makes puppy eyes at the camera, and Cass smiles - oh no, that’s her evil smile, _oh no-_

“Better - you come to lunch. Sunday. No excuses.”

“Cass. Those are _family_ lunches. I’m not lunches- I mean, I’m not family. Please don’t make me go?” Steph’s voice is plaintive, pleading.

Cass just narrows her eyes and smiles. “You are now Lunches. Forever.”

“Fine. Rename my contact Lunches, do what you’d like, but _please_ don’t make me face your family for lunch. Have _mercy_ , oh Great and Mighty Black Bat,” she says, drawing out her words exaggeratedly to lighten the mood, and it works. Cass giggles. 

“Lunch. Then shopping trip. Deal?”

Stephanie’s always been too soft-hearted for her own good. Her mom always said so, and it’s ridiculously visible in how she gives in four-point-two-five seconds after Cass giggles. Heaving a sigh, she smiles at Cass. “Deal.”

Cass smiles again, and even though she smiles all the time, she manages to make each one feel like a rarity, something to be treasured. “Bye,” she says, waving her hand once, and Steph waves back and cuts the call. As the screen fades to black, she lets her arms flop down next to her and tries not to scream out of sheer frustration. Her mind feels like a public bus - overcrowded and overwhelming and it makes her want to yell. Or cry. Or hit something.

She needs some fresh air. 

* * *

The window from her room led onto a fire escape that gave her easy roof access. She puts on the Spoiler bodysuit in her room (yes, she brought it along, it’s good terrain-transfer-training, okay?), and then clips the cape and hood on when she’s on the roof. Suddenly it’s like she can breathe easy again, like someone took a weight out of her heart. The air seems clearer, and the lights of the city twinkle around her and for the first time in a long while Stephanie feels _happy_. 

A light summer breeze ruffles her hair, and she heads out, looking for criminals to beat up and people to save. She doesn’t find very many - not every city in New Jersey has it as bad as Gotham, after all - but she finds herself savouring her breath she takes, every leap she makes - it’s all exhilarating in a way that makes her long for more. 

She stops two muggings and breaks up a fight between two drunk teenagers in an alley over the course of an hour and a half, and both altercations took less than a minute to resolve. She’s actually pretty grateful for that; she hadn’t really been in the mood for beating up people Crime Alley-style. It is weird though, how she’d gone from playing piano to punching people to clear her head. _Natural progression of hobbies, really,_ she hears Tim say in the back of her head, and she shakes herself free of the thought. If she concentrates really hard, she can remember the motions of playing _Fur Elise_ , the way each note rang out in the dim light of their apartment, the smell of smoke and summer heavy in the evening air. She vows quietly to herself in that moment, perched on a red-brick building across from a public library, that should she ever get herself a place of her own, she was going to save up for a piano. A nice one, secondhand maybe, but a good solid piano nonetheless that she could play to her heart’s content. One that she’d earn for herself, one that she’d never let anyone pawn for drug money.

She kicks her legs against the building from where she’s sitting at the memory of Crystal Brown saying _sorry, sweetheart, but Mommy really really needed the money, okay? Promise I’ll get you a new one, honey. Honest._ The Beethoven tastes bittersweet now and Stephanie finds herself getting angry again but it’s the kind of anger that burns in your face and blocks your throat and fills your eyes with tears, the kind that’s so all-encompassing that finds your heart rubbed raw and your fingers clenched and your stomach rolling, the kind that you can’t get away from until you’ve sobbed it all out of your system. She buries her face in her hands and the hot tears trickle out from between her fingers and make dark spots on the dull carmine of the bricks she’s sitting on. Isn’t it funny how she’d been fine all day, talking to staff and administration and thinking about how to-if she was even _going to- b_ reak the news to her not-family, _if_ they even gave a shit, and now she’s crying thanks to the promise of a piano she might never actually even get! Steph thinks it’s hilarious. It is, in fact, _so_ funny, that she bursts out into hysterical laughter, the wet-sounding giggles making her sound like the victim of a Joker attack.

This only leads to more sobbing, ragged heart-wrenching sobs that leave her throat raw and her lungs wheezing, tear-tracks fresh on her face as she looks out at the distant skyline in the blue dark, little red lights flickering on the shadowy shapes of faraway buildings. She pushes back her hood to wrap her hair around her fingers against her skull, her head pounding and her eyes aching. So caught up in her outburst is Steph that she doesn’t realise someone’s behind her until she feels a gentle hand on her shoulder, and she whips around to see who it is, extending her staff with her other hand to take care of any threat this person may pose and-

It’s just another girl wearing a mask. “Hey. It’ll be okay,” says the girl softly. “Whatever it is that you’re going through, you’re gonna be okay, but I need you to move away from the edge.”

Move away from the edge? What, does this kid think she’s some kind of suicide risk?

The girl is still looking at her kindly, waiting for her to make a move. 

_Ah, right,_ thinks Steph. _I was wailing and pulling my hair out on the edge of a tall-ish building. No wonder this looks bad._

“I’m not going to jump,” she says. “Honest.” Sheesh, this girl’s actually standing quite a few feet away. How is her hand still on Steph’s...shoulder? Her eyes track the girl’s arm, and she must be seeing things because in the low light of the early dusk it looks rubbery and...stretched out. 

“Okay,” says the girl, who Steph now notes is wearing a large symbol of a lightning bolt on her blue tunic-thing. “Glad to hear it, but I’d be even gladder if you could _juuust_ scoot a lil’ bit,” she says, motioning away from the edge of the building with her free hand. Light from the building next to them catches on her hand, and Steph spots something red on against the brown of the girl’s skin and claps a hand to her mouth. “You’re bleeding!”

The girl retracts both of her arms (seriously _wack_ , dude) and flips her hands rapidly, looking for an injury, then holds them palms-out in front of Steph, her eyes widening in panic. “Where!?”

Steph points to the girl’s right hand, where she can see bright red smudges on her fingertips. “There, look! That’s...your blood, right?” she asks, the thought that _maybe this girl is some kind of serial-killer-slash-vampire_ rising to the forefront of her mind. Why else would her hands be covered in red splotches?

The girl tilts her palms back towards herself, squinting at her skin. Then she looks up at Stephanie with a pointedly amused expression. “That’s not my blood,” she says, and Steph recoils in horror. “No-no, I mean it’s not blood at all,” she corrects, holding her hands up in surrender. “Those are just smudges from my _mehendi_ , that’s all.”

Steph is confused and against her better judgement, she takes a step closer to her. “What’s...ma-hendy?”

The girl curls her lips in and rests her ‘bloody’ fingertips gently against her mouth before looking away from Stephanie for a second. Steph gets the distinct impression that she’s laughing at her, and is about to ask _what the hell_ is going on here, when the girl looks back at her with a hint of laughter in her brown eyes and Steph feels herself go red under the mask. The girl smiles. “ _Mehen-di,_ not ma-hendy,” she corrects, barely concealing her laughter. “You, uh, you probably know them as henna-uh, henna tattoos?”

“Like, those culturally-appropriated tattoos white women get on vacations to _‘find themselves’_ in India?” asks Steph, raising an eyebrow. 

“Yeah. Sure,” says the girl, smiling like she was going to burst out laughing. “Just like those white women, except we do our henna for special occasions and with real, y’know, _henna_ ,” she adds, holding out her left hand - it was covered in pretty patterns made in bright red lines. The darker skin on the back of her hand made the red appear more maroon-brown than bright vermillion, but the soft pink skin on her palm displayed a concentric flowery design in the most oxygenated-blood-red she’d ever seen, intricate lines that disappeared all the way down her wrist under the set of heavy gold bangles on her arm. “I just did this hand this evening, and the cone must’ve leaked on my fingers when I was doing it.”

Steph gasps and takes the girl’s hand in hers, tracing the detailed swirls and flowers that wrap their way up the back of her hand in awe. “It’s so _beautiful_ ,” she breathes, and the girl ducks her head, looking away and grinning. “Thanks,” she says, a little awkwardly.

“My name’s Ms. Marvel. It’s nice to meet you,” says the girl, and she holds out her free hand when Stephanie finally lets go of the other one. 

“Spoiler,” says Stephanie, shaking Ms. Marvel’s hand. 

“You look...familiar,” says Ms. Marvel, squinting at her hair. “Were you...a Robin, at some point?”

Steph’s kinda taken aback by this. Not many people remember her stint as an expendable traffic light, and this is the first time anyone outside of Gotham’s acknowledged the one and only Girl Robin. Hell, it’s the only time anyone, period, has acknowledged the one and only Girl Robin. 

She obviously doesn’t tell Ms. Marvel all of this. Instead, she says, very intelligently: “Uh...yes.”

Ms. Marvel tilts her head at her, still squinting. “Wait a sec. You were Batgirl #3 too, weren’t you?” she asks, and Steph is a little bit worried now because whoever this Marvel kid is, she’s _clearly_ done her research, and that means trouble. Well-read kids almost _always_ mean trouble. Just look at how Bruce turned out!

“Yeah,” replies Steph slowly, “I was. How’d you know?” 

She nods at Steph’s outfit, and Steph looks down at herself, suddenly self-conscious. “Your purple paneling-oh, and the staff,” says Ms. Marvel. “None of the other Batgirls use a staff.”

Impressive, thinks Steph. “Impressive,” she says out loud, and Ms. Marvel lifts one corner of her mouth in a half-smile. 

“I’m a little-bit hero-crazy, if we’re being honest,” she whispers with a smile. “The Batgirls and the Birds of Prey especially, and all the female heroes up in New York, y’know, Captain Marvel, Spider-Woman, Black Widow, Troia, Starfire... you get the picture,” she says sheepishly, looking away and scratching the back of her head nervously. “They’re-you’re- just so cool, you know?”

“Yeah,” says Stephanie, blinking. She shuts her eyes and curses herself for this stupid monosyllabic stupor because she’s just talking to another teenage superhero, _get your act together Stephanie_. She’s a hero, for fuck’s sake. She’s battled Killer Croc and Black Mask, she can stop acting like a total nutcase in front of the new meta kid.

She drops Ms. Marvel’s hand and shakes herself, opening her eyes with a wide smile (that she hopes Marvel gets the gist of, because she’s not going to pull down her mask.) “Sorry, let’s start over. Hi, I’m Spoiler, a.k.a Batgirl number three, a.k.a Robin three-point-five, or four, depending on who you ask, and Gotham’s most purple vigilante,” she says brightly. 

Ms. Marvel twists her mouth like she’s trying to hide a giggle. “Very nice to meet you, O Great Purple One,” she replies, and it makes Steph snort. “What business does thee have here, on a rooftop so far away from thine kingdom?” she continues, leaning forward comically with an eyebrow raised and both her hands on her hips and Steph chuckles. She flops back down on the lip of the roof, wiping away the tears on her face and catches Ms. Marvel watching her sadly.

“Just...going through it, I guess,” she sighs, and Ms. Marvel comes over to sit next to her. Her hands are in her lap, and Steph can’t help but stare at the patterns on her hand again. She picks up Ms. Marvel’s hand again and focuses on the minute details hidden in the design. Ms. Marvel doesn’t really seem to mind. 

“Wanna talk about it?” she asks kindly. “It might help.”

Steph bites her lip. These are...civilian problems. If she starts talking now, she might never be able to stop, and that could lead to major problems in the secret-identity department. It also shouldn’t be on this girl (who seems younger than her) to shoulder all of Steph’s problems, buuuut...she could use someone to talk to - besides, she’s probably never gonna see her again, unless she moves here in which case it would be nice to already have a friend. 

“I can’t help but notice that you’re a little...entranced by my _mehendi_ ,” says Ms. Marvel. “If you’d like, I could do yours and you could tell me what’s bothering you?” Steph would like that, would like that very much. But she has to be sure of something first. 

“Are you sure that wouldn’t be considered cultural appropriation, cause, y’know, maybe I came to Jersey City to _find_ myself,” asks Steph dramatically, pulling a face and fluttering her eyelashes. Ms. Marvel has to put a hand to her mouth and look away when she says: “It’s _my_ culture, I’ll decide when it’s being appropriated thank-you-very-much,” with a grin and then she _steps off the building!?-_ and lands on her feet, stretching her legs out so she’s as high as the building. 

“I’ll be back in ten minutes, dude. Don’t do anything stupid,” she says, and then she marches off into the city, her silhouette looking like those men on stilts from the circus. 

Steph watches her go, kicking her legs against the red brick wall and scrubbing at her eyes.

* * *

“-and _then_ his Royal Stupidness decides that I’m not cut out to be Robin! That I’m too reckless and irresponsible, and he was a total _bitch_ about it too! And then even though I was fired I tried to help, and, well, _maybe_ , he was right but I still _tried!_ And then I came back and he _didn’t even talk to me!_ I hate that guy,” says Stephanie angrily, tucking her face-mask under her chin. Ms. Marvel nods, tongue sticking out a little bit as she adds another flower to the growing bunch on the back of Stephanie’s hand. 

See, she had started to explain why she’d come to JC and why she was bawling her eyes out, but then had quickly realised that without context this situation made little to no sense at all so she’d had to to rewind all the way to the beginning, sans the deets and the names, of course.

“And then he went and _died_ -” 

“Wait, back up, Batman _died_?!” 

“Well, yeah. Sorta. Not really? He just got swept up in time, kinda.” 

“Huh. Well that makes _no_ sense at all, carry on. Oh and, uh, could you stop gesturing so hard? This stuff stains really fast and you’ll end up with squiggles instead of flowers if you move so much. Anyway. Finish the story.”

“Right. So _then_ I was Batgirl for a bit and then my ex-boyfriend, that doofus, he’s all _weird_ about it, and so is the new Batman! Like, I can hold my own, thank you very much! I DON’T NEED YOU TO BE ALL WEIRDLY GUILTY ABOUT IT, I’VE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE I WAS FOURTEEN!” She has to stop and take a breath there, ‘cause she’s yelling now. Ms. Marvel’s actually put the henna cone down and started watching her concernedly instead.

“What,” asks Stephanie. 

Ms. Marvel twists her mouth before exclaiming loudly, “Fourteen? You were out on Gotham streets at _fourteen_? What would possess you to do _that_?”

Steph tugs on a lock of her hair with her non-henna-ed hand before answering. “You’ve never felt responsible for the crimes of your wannabe supervillain father, have you,” she says without emotion. The words in her mouth taste even bitterer than that time she’d taken a sip out of Tim’s coffee cup to spite him. “Cluemaster,” she deadpans before Ms. Marvel can ask, “like Riddler, but a D-lister instead of a C-lister.”

Ms. Marvel looks like she wants to say something, but she stays silent, waiting for Steph to continue. Steph looks away. 

“I became ‘the Spoiler’ because I wanted to ‘spoil’ his crimes,” she says finally, half-heartedly making air quotes with her free hand to establish her point. “My first suit was made out of cotton because I didn’t have anything to make it out of. I don’t even know why I thought that was a good idea. Why did I think that it was a good idea? I couldn’t fight, no-one even wanted me out there, all I did was put other people at risk-”

“Hey!” Ms. Marvel’s voice is sharp in the warm night air and Steph feels her hands firmly clasped around Steph’s shoulders. “Hey,” repeats Ms. Marvel slowly, “What you did- what you _chose_ to do- was incredibly brave. You wanted to make sure your father didn’t hurt anyone and the only way you could do that was yourself, okay, I get that. Sometimes, you just gotta take matters into your own hands - just gotta fix what no one else will, what no one else has the time for.”

Ms. Marvel lets go of Steph’s shoulders and smiles at Steph ruefully. “If it counts for anything, I think ‘The Spoiler’ is an excellent vigilante name. Catchy, unique, not bird-or-bat related- checks all the boxes. And don’t feel bad about the suit,” she says, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning forward conspiratorially. “My first outfit was an old wetsuit and a fanny pack,” she giggles, and Steph finds herself smiling despite the hurricane of emotions threatening to swallow her whole.

“Seriously though,” says Ms. Marvel, picking up Steph’s hand and resuming the henna, “You’re an excellent hero. You may not have had Batman’s formal training, but you had the heart and the compassion to try and help your-excuse me for this, but _shithole_ -of a city. You wanted to make a difference, and that’s what matters. Screw whatever else anyone says.”

Stephanie would deny it vehemently later, but she most definitely did let a couple of tears slip.

“Good is not a thing that you are. It’s a thing that you do. A choice you make, every day, and the fact that you’re going above and beyond to help in any way you can? You’re doing more than just _good_ ,” says Ms. Marvel, eyes sparkling.

“You really think so?” sniffles Steph woefully.

“I’d bet my life on it, if gambling wasn’t _haram_ ,” replies Ms. Marvel with a grin. 

Steph chuckles wetly at that. Ms. Marvel carries on with the henna, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she focuses on making the petals on the little flowers even. The way the black stream forms patterns on her pale skin is mesmerising, and Steph watches Ms. Marvel fill up her hand with little spirals turning into flowers, which she then outlines twice and then adds more petals to.

“You know, I met three of your Bat-boys,” says Ms. Marvel, not looking up from her work. 

“They’re very nice and all, but all three of them immediately assumed I was like, totally incompetent, just ‘cause I’m younger and like to wear brightly colored clothing. Very condescending. I can see why you’d wanna leave that behind.”

Steph’s eyebrows fly up in amazement when she hears this. Three? But none of the boys had said anything about a stretchy girl in Jersey City. Or mentioned going to Jersey City. Hmm.

“Yeah,” she replies, nodding. “They’ve been like this since day one. It’s funny, cause I’m kind of the only one not tied legally or historically to them, ya know, and I’m the only one they act like this around. Yeah, okay, maybe I’m not as super-skilled as Ba-Oracle or Black Bat, but _still_.” She sighs. “I just wanna go somewhere with people that won’t make me feel inferior all the time.”

“Well, I personally think it would be super-awesome if you moved here. It would be nice to have another hero-friend, especially a girl, in the city, ‘cause all my friends live across the river. It would be fun, you know?” says Ms. Marvel with a smile in her voice. 

Steph open her mouth to respond, but the words get stuck in her throat at the thought of leaving Cass and their impromptu mid-patrol waffle dates or the girls’ nights spent at the Clocktower with Babs, or going to Wal-Mart with Duke specifically to buy PopTarts at three a.m. or even baking with Alfred and going to the zoo with Damian. Even the thought of never solving another Calendar Man crime makes her want to start sobbing again.

“Unless...you’re not actually ready to move?” Ms. Marvel’s voice is soft as she keeps her head down, focused on drawing flowers that start under her cuticles, waiting for an answer. “It’s okay if you aren’t, you know? You grew up there. I can tell you’re attached - it can’t be all bad if you’ve lived there for so long already.”

There’s hot tears welling up in her eyes again and Steph has to look away. She remembers Jason, showing up with an overly-sweet iced latte after classes to bribe her into sharing a case; Dick sharing fries post-patrol and giving her advice on where to get cheap first-aid supplies; Tim, laughing at her as drops a pancake on the floor; Tim, bingeing cheesy horror flicks with her; Tim, watching the sunrise with her on the roof of the Manor. 

Her lip quivers and she whispers “I don’t know.”

“Well,” Ms. Marvel says, putting the henna cone down, finally done with the pattern, “I can help with that. My dad taught me a trick as a kid. I’m gonna take this quarter that I have-” she produces a shiny silver coin seemingly out of nowhere “-and flip it. Heads, you move to Jersey City. Tails, and you stay in good ol’ Gotham. Sound fair?”

Steph wants to protest, wants to say that she doesn’t want to base her entire future on a random toss of fate, that she wants to, for _once_ in her life, think things through- but it’s too late. The silver coin winks in the moonlight as it flips once, twice, and she’s suddenly reminded of Two-Face and his lucky coin- and Ms. Marvel catches it in one smooth motion and slaps it onto the back of her other hand. She looks at Steph, a mischievous smile playing on her lips. “Which one do you think it’ll be?” she asks. 

Steph just shrugs in dismay. “Alright,” Ms. Marvel concedes. “Which one do you _hope_ it’ll be?”

Another shrug. “Well, may the odds be _ever_ in your favour,” she says, in an almost-accurate parody of Effie Trinket, and unsheathes the coin. Steph winces, not wanting to look but forces herself to anyway and it’s-

It’s a tail. The coin landed tail-side-up and Steph breathes out a sigh of relief she didn’t know she was holding back. She feels like she might start crying, or laughing or both. In front of her, Ms. Marvel grins. “And that’s how you know which one you wanted,” she laughs.

“So you _weren’t_ going to make me choose my future based on an arbitrary game of chance,” confirms Steph incredulously.

“Are you _insane_?” scoffs Ms. Marvel. “Never, _ever_ , make a major life decision based on coin tosses. Pros and cons lists, baby. That’s the way to go.”

Steph laughs brightly, scrubbing away the tears tracks on her face from before - her heart feels so much lighter now, almost like it could fly away. And then her stomach grumbles. Loudly. She flashes Ms. Marvel a sheepish grin. Apparently, crime-fighting and crying on an empty stomach left you quite drained. 

“You got a Waffle House in this part of town? I could really go for some waffles right about now,” says Steph.

“I’ll do you one better. There’s a diner not far from here and I saved the owner’s daughter from the Inventor. They make better waffles than Waffle House _and_ I get them for free. And with extra whip. How about that instead?”

Steph sighs dramatically and holds both hands to her heart. “Truly a land of miracles and wonder,” she says, looking heavenward. “Maybe I’ll move here after all.”

“Watch the _mehendi_!”

“Sorry!”

Ms. Marvel gets up and jumps off the building again, but this time her whole body grows and when she lands, Stephanie feels a slight tremor move through the building. 

“Come on,” says Ms. Marvel, bringing her now-huge palm to the edge of the building. “Hop in.”

Stephanie vaults over the lip of the roof and onto Ms. Marvel’s waiting hand. “You know,” she says conversationally, getting settled in her palm, “if the superhero thing doesn’t work out, you could always just become the next version of Uber.”

* * *

The diner is cute. Very cosy - the warm white bulb hanging over each booth casts the whole place in a mellow buttery glow. The seats themselves are actually comfier than any diner back in Gotham, and the whole place smells like fresh coffee and not old frying-oil! Steph thinks she might’ve stepped into heaven. 

The waitress sets down a plate of waffles in front of the two of them piled high with whipped cream and strawberries, and leaves a little bottle of maple syrup. Ms. Marvel thanks the waitress with a smile and gestures at the waffles. “Dig in!”

Steph licks her lips and reaches for a fork, only to realise that her henna’s all dried up. A bit near her wrist cracks, and she can see the bright red stain under it. The henna falls dangerously close to the waffles, and Ms. Marvel realises her mistake. “Ah! Right, sorry about that - here, I’ll cut ‘em up into pieces so we can get them easier.”

She makes quick work of it, and soon both of them are chewing on the best waffles Stephanie’s ever tasted. 

“Mmh-” says Steph, closing her eyes and relaxing, “-oh _maaaan_. Thaf’s some good waffl’ righ’ _fhere_. Mmmh.”

“Right? Told you they were awesome. Hey, what time is it?”

Steph checks her phone real quick. “It’s about nine-thirty. Why?”

“I need to be home by ten. I promised my mom I’d do her _mehendi_ after I went out on patrol for a bit,” replies Ms. Marvel, leaning back against the seat. 

“You said you only did this for special events. What’s the occasion?” asks Steph, because she’s genuinely curious. 

“Well, uh, it’s Eid tomorrow. Bakra-I mean Eid ul-Adha,” says Ms. Marvel, tucking her hair behind her ear. “It’s basically three days of what you’d consider Christmas, but for Muslims.”

“Huh,” she says, mind whirring. Ms. Marvel seems to have clammed up in the moment, eyeing Steph suspiciously, and Steph can guess why - she’s seen the graffiti near mosques and beat up several racist shitheads going after visibly Muslim folks - so she tries to set her at ease. “I’m just curious ‘cause I’ve never heard of-” _think fast Steph, what have you never heard of?_ \- “a significant date for Muslim celebrations!” _Bingo, she’s smiling again, advantage Stephanie!_

“Yeah, like Starbucks comes out with the Happy Holidays once December starts, and I know Christmas and Hanukkah are both around that time, right? Most other festivals are marked by the crazy sales, but I’ve never heard anything about a certain time of year for Eid?”

Ms. Marvel shifts in her seat and leans forward to explain. “Well... You haven’t heard, mostly ‘cause Islamophobia and all that jazz, but our occasions shift with the lunar calendar, so ten days back each year. And technically there’s two Eids, two months apart.”

“Wait...Lunar? So you know shit about the moon?” asks Stephanie earnestly.

“Uh...sure?” comes the reply, slightly taken aback by the change in subject.

“Okay, great. What are those _things_ on the face of the moon? I can’t remember the name.” Steph leans forward, eyes wide, waiting for an answer. 

“You mean... the craters, I guess?” says Ms. Marvel, confusion coloring her tone.

“ _CRATERS!_ ” bellows Steph, smacking the table in frustration.”That’s what they’re called!”

Ms. Marvel giggles, and then gets up. “I better get going, Spoiler. I trust the Great Purple One can finish the noble task of consuming all the waffles?”

Steph smiles. “You betcha, Ms. Marvel. And hey,” she says, turning serious for a second, “You _really_ helped me out today - above and beyond. I can’t thank you enough, Ms. Marvel.” She about to say more, but Ms. Marvel puts a hand on her shoulder and grins. “I’m glad I could help. Everyone needs someone to talk to, even if they themselves are a hero, y’know? I know you’re not moving here, but if you ever happen by again I’d love to catch up, yeah? Take care, Spoiler,” she says, then does a cute half-salute and is out the door. 

* * *

Steph finishes up the waffles, and then heads out too. She grapples to a nearby rooftop and dials Cass’s number. “Hey,” she says, the summer breeze ruffling her hair, “I’ll be home tomorrow. And I’ll come to your family lunch but only on _one_ condition - you help me prank Tim and Damian. Yeah, we can get Duke in on it.” A pause. “Awesomesauce. See you tomorrow at two. Don’t forget the concrete powder!” another pause. “Yeah. Love you too. Bye,” and she swipes the End Call button. 

Life in Gotham’s not all bad, she muses. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaand we're back to diner scenes!
> 
> this one got slightly heavier; I just have a lot of...............thoughts, about steph's place on the hero scene and in the batfamily. anyway!! i hope you enjoyed! 
> 
> as always, kudos and comments are much appreciated. thank you all so much for your kind words! 
> 
> and hey? thanks <3.


	6. Duke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Duke is the new kid, and as such, his brothers make him do more legwork. They say it builds character - he thinks they're just lazy. He does it anyway though, because he's nice like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the sake of the story we're going to pretend like Duke doesn't know that he's the son of Gnomon (I forgot when he finds out, and couldn't be bothered to research bc I'm lazy like Tim and Jason)
> 
> hope you enjoy!

_ 10:48 am _

tim: the signalcycle is a really shit name n you know it

duke: is n o t

duke: you’re just jealous cause it’s a better name than  _ drake  _

tim:..

tim: it’s a work in prgress ok

tim: *progress

_ 10:53 am _

tim:  _ frequent_ms.marvel_spotting_sites.pdf  _

tim: just hit up these locations and see if she’s there and interrogate her 

tim: you’ll know her when you see her 

tim: you literally can’t miss her

tim: she makes the original robin costume look dull

duke: how do you know she’s even active during the day? you said you met her at night

duke: and don’t diss colors ok not all of us are lil emo shits

tim: are you calling b a lil emo shit

duke: why are you so obsessed with this marvel chick anyway

duke: oooo does timmy have a crUuUsh

tim: shut up

tim: she’s powerful. she could be a potential ally but i need to know if she’s actually good or she’s playing us

tim: see if you can get more info out of her

duke: so what i’m hearing is: try and find out if m.m. is actually into me or not. gotcha

tim: shut up

* * *

Around 10:59 am, Duke puts his phone away and starts up his Signal-Cycle again. Despite what Tim says, countless others (Dick and Stephanie) have told him that the Signal-Cycle is an excellent name. Tim isn’t allowed to name things anyway. Red Robin? And Drake? Yeesh. 

Anyway. He’s driving towards the first spot on Tim’s list when he hears another  _ ping _ on his phone. He rolls his eyes and pulls over, taking his phone out to check the message. Tim gets antsy if not replied to ASAP - that’s one of the most important things he’d learned after moving into Wayne Manor. Surprisingly though, it’s not Tim. Duke squints at his phone, trying to read the text from his notifications. The glare off his screen is throwing him off, so he moves into the relative shade of a nearby building to try and read the message. 

(unknown): hey duke

(unknown): heard you were going to jersey city. do me a favour and check out this place for any kinda sus activity.

(unknown): 📍 _ location _

(unknown): - j

Duke resists the urge to smash his head into the brick wall he’s standing near. It’s very hard, because  _ of course _ Jason would send him off on some sort of side-quest while he’s out doing a favour for Tim. He opts for an exaggerated eye-roll instead and annoyedly jabs out a  _ fine. you owe me dude _ to Jason and hits send. 

He opens up the location and it shows him a little pizza place on some street corner not too far from here. Which is good, because if it had been far, well, Duke would have still, like,  _ gone _ , but he would have complained about it more. 

The sun is bright in typical early August fashion, the air humid and swampy. It makes him grateful that he’s wearing his more-civilian version of the Signal suit, which happens to be a yellow kevlar-reinforced leather jacket over black body armour. He’s also got the helmet and the blades, but currently the helmet is just acting as a motorcycle helmet and the blades are tucked away inside his jacket. All in all, it doesn’t draw too much attention, but still leaves him well-protected in a fight. Perfect for stealthier recon missions (read; favours for older brothers who are currently confined to the living room couch because they have traitorous ankles). 

The sunshine glints off the gleaming black metal of his bike as he pulls up outside an abandoned (probably condemned) building. The windows are sloppily boarded up and the walls seem to be crumbling in places; there’s a faded sign over the entrance that might have read  _ Giovanni’s Pizza _ some several millennia ago. There’s no noise from inside the restaurant nor the apartments above, so Duke pushes open the rotting wood-and-glass door and steps into another world, almost. 

The movement of the door makes the settled dust rise, and the streams of light coming through the gaps between the boards on the windows light up the dust motes floating in the air, making them glow like fairy dust. A few of the tables in the restaurant had been pushed together to make some kind of mega-table, like a poker table in some cliche gangster hideout except that these tables were circular and as such, did not lend themselves to the purpose very well. The night-vision in his helmet makes it an easy search for Duke, but the place showed no sign of having been visited in a while. There’s bullet holes in the wall next to the door, and Duke tracks their supposed trajectory over to one of the chairs that’s half-facing both the table and the door. He crouches by the chair and lo and behold, there’s some bullet casings by it, covered in a thick layer of dust. So there had been a shootout here, probably one that Jason was involved in, but the grime that coated every surface in this place indicated that it had been a while since anyone had come in here.

He wishes Jason had been clearer in his definition of ‘sus activity’. From the looks of things, this was clearly a meeting spot for some kind of criminal gang (what type?) that had been abandoned (because of Jason?) for a while. Does it count as suspicious if no one’s been back here in a while? It could mean they’d found another hideout, or they’d gone underground. If the police here were even slightly less corrupt than Gotham P. D., it’s possible that all the people involved in this operation had already been taken into custody. Of course, he wouldn’t know for sure, ‘cause Jason refuses to give any sort of context. Why? He's just a jerk like that.

Duke sighs and gets up, brushing the dirt off his knees. He turns to go, hand on the doorknob, when something catches his eyes. Where the light spills onto the ground from the windows, he can see the shadow of  _ something  _ drop itself from the rafters and he turns sideways to face it, but there’s no one there. That when he sees the ghostly outline of what looks to be a girl stretching herself down from the ceiling, illuminated in little yellow patches by the light from the window. 

It’s his powers, he realises with a start. 

He squints, and the girl walks closer to him, saying something, but the image dissipates. He’s suddenly alone again in the dimly-lit would-be pizzeria, ‘cept there’s someone else here too. He looks up expectantly and suddenly sees a whole girl sitting there (where did she come from?!) swinging her legs and observing him curiously. He takes a step back, because  _ what the hell? _ and the girl (who’s dressed in red and blue) stretches herself down from the beam she was sitting on.

“You’re-you’re Ms. Marvel,” he manages to say, transfixed in shock as she un-stretches her arms, making them normal and human-looking again. 

She steps towards him, just like in his vision, suddenly on the offensive. “Who are  _ you _ ?” she asks, brows knitted ( _ ah so that’s what she was saying _ ) and Duke kinda just holds his hands up in surrender. 

“I-uh, I-I’m the Signal,” he replies pointing to the bat on his jacket. “I’m one of the Bats.” It feels weird to say that out loud, if he’s being honest. He’s never really going to get used to that.

Ms. Marvel comes closer, squinting at the bat. “Huh,” she says, looking him in the eyes (or where his eyes would be if he took off the helmet) “The Signal. Haven’t heard of you before. You’re new?”

He feels himself go a little red under the helmet. “Yeah, I-uh, just got started recently,” and he’s about to say something else, but he’s saved from embarrassing himself when Ms. Marvel holds up her index finger to say ‘hold on’ as she ducks her head to the side and sneezes loudly enough to make more dust fly up. 

“Sorry,” she says thickly, wiping her eyes, “my allergies are- _ aacHOO!  _ actibg ub.” She sniffles, as if to drive her point home and points at the door. “Can we cont- _ aaACHOO! _ -contibue this conversation ou’side?” 

Duke opens the door. “Ladies first,” he grins, and Ms. Marvel rolls her eyes at him sarcastically as she walks past. “ _ Such _ a gebtleman,” she says, sarcasm dripping off her words like the snot dripping from her nose. He follows her into the sunshine, then hands her some tissue and a little bottle of Sweet Pea hand sanitizer Stephanie had bought him once. He’d protested, saying it was never going to come in useful, but she’d insisted. 

“Thank you,” she says, handing back the bottle. “So, the Signal. You’re another one, yes?”

Duke nods. 

“Huh. Well, for the record, I wasn’t trying to be mean when I said i hadn’t heard of you. There’s just so  _ many  _ of you guys, and all of you keep playing hot potato with your names and costumes and the Internet only has so many clear photos of all of you.” She wipes her nose with the tissue again. 

Duke shrugs. “I get it. Like, every other day there’s a new one in a different color. And they’re all Bat-Something. Gets hard to keep track, and I live there.”

“Right? Like, I heard there’s a Bat-Woman now? And she’s a redhead - did the original Batgirl grow up to become her?” asks Ms. Marvel, looking greatly confused. Duke cringes. Babs being an in-field vigilante...touchy subject. 

“And there’s that Robot Batman too, what's-his-name...” she wonders aloud, completely lost in thought. “Batwing?” he supplies, and Ms. Marvel snaps her fingers and grins. “That’s the one. Bat-Somethings all around. At least your name is different, which is good.”

“That, and the fact that I prefer to do my superhero-ing in the daytime,” he replies. Ms. Marvel looks at him curiously, tilting her head to the side. “What?”

“Nothing, it’s just...” she blinks and taps her chin thoughtfully, looking for a way to vocalise her thoughts. “None of the other Bats are ever referred to as supers - by other people, or themselves. It’s funny, you know, the line that’s drawn between vigilantism and superheroism, ‘cause they’re technically both illegal but you don’t see the police hunting for Superman’s identity, right?” 

Duke just kind of blinks at her. What is he supposed to say? 

“I guess the only thing separating the two would be, like, having powers. You a ‘powered’ person, dude?” She got all of that from one throwaway line about superhero-ing? So she’s smart and  _ definitely  _ not to be underestimated. “Sort of,” he says hesitantly, not wanting to give away too much about himself. 

“Ooh! What can you do?” Her eyes widen with excitement. “Lemme guess. Super speed? Super strength?” she asks, craning her neck to get a closer look at his ‘armor’. “You’re wearing a lot of yellow,” she says, stepping closer to examine his helmet, “are you working with Wolverine? Daredevil?” and then she steps behind him and pokes his shoulder. “-Hey!” he yelps.

“Hmm, kevlar. So you’re not bulletproof, and therefore not like Luke Cage,” she says, stepping back around him. 

“Who is Luke Cage?”

“Hero of Harlem. Look him up.” When she continues to stare him down for answers, he sighs.

“I’m a light-based meta,” he mutters finally. “I can do this-” and he looks down at her shadow, feels the push and pull of the dark, and expands it outwards with a deep exhale. The shadows spill outwards in every direction, making the sunny little spot they were standing in look totally overcast. It’s a watered-down version of what he can actually do, and he purposefully left out the photo-prediction side of things, but it’s enough to make Ms. Marvel shiver. 

“Woah,” she says after a beat, completely speechless. 

Duke smirks. “Yeah,” he says with a shrug.

“What about the ‘no-metas-in-Gotham’ rule, though?” she challenges. “Why would Batman break his own rule?”

“I’m pretty sure he only has that rule to keep Green Lantern out. Green Lantern is the  _ worst _ .”

“Agreed. Even so, how’d you get past that?”

Duke does his best to contain a pained sigh. “I was into the heroics biz long before Batman took me in. Guess he didn’t want to waste potential, or whatever,” he says, making air quotes around ‘potential’. “Once he saw I had powers, well, we kind of just rolled with it.”

“So how’d you get ‘em?” At some point, while Ms. Marvel had been quizzing him on his powers, he’d started to amble down the street, and she had started trailing after him. One of the locations that Tim had sent him had been a corner store that she seemed to spend a lot of time at, almost like her unofficial base of operations. It wasn’t too far from here, according to the map on his phone he kept glancing surreptitiously at, so he’d left his cycle in stealth mode by the pizza place. He’d just pick it up later. 

“I...don’t know. They kind of just...manifested. I guess I was born with them?” 

Ms. Marvel scrunches her nose as she catches up to him. “ _ Bo-ring _ . No radioactive spiders, or gamma rays, or lightning bolts? Lame origin story, dude.”

“Oh yeah? How’d you get yours?” he asks defensively. 

“Terrigen Mist,” she replies unhelpfully with a smirk. 

Duke pauses. “That doesn’t sound like any of the metahuman activators I’ve seen.”

“That's because it’s not  _ for  _ metahumans.” This time he’s left trailing behind her as she walks away. “Hold up, hold up,” he says, jogging to get back next to her, “you’re not a metahuman? Then what  _ are _ you?” Could this be what Tim was talking about? Was it possible that she was an alien? She had shapeshifting powers, like the Martians or the Skrulls. Shit. Apart from the Supers, Starfire and the Martians, most aliens presented themselves as threats to the Earth. If Ms. Marvel was an alien, well, he had to do something before Jersey City became ground zero for another Chitauri or Apokoliptian invasion. 

Ms. Marvel squints at him suspiciously as they walk, and Duke feels his heart rate rise. Then she rolls her eyes. “Human,  _ duh _ ! What  _ else _ would I be. Why are you so interested anyway?”

When Tim had said to not be afraid to ‘interrogate’ her, he hadn’t been expecting it to be this hard. Duke makes a mental note to brush up on his improv skills, then forges ahead with the first half-baked reason that comes to mind. 

“Well...I’m not a  _ metahuman _ metahuman, and I’m not really sure where my powers came from, and I was hoping...you had some insight?” It’s not the most believable of reasons, but Ms. Marvel seems to buy it. 

“Well,” she says, “You didn’t happen to get your powers last October, did you?”

Duke shakes his head. 

“Well, then you’re not like me. The Terrigen Cells would have activated any latent Inhuman powers in you, but if you didn’t get them the same time as me...” So she’s an Inhuman with a capital I. That doesn’t exactly fill him with ease, because he doesn’t know what that  _ is _ , but if she’s opening up this easily then she can’t be too much of a threat, right? 

Her continued theorising snaps him out of his thoughts. “You control shadows...is it possible you’re somewhat like that girl from the Teen Titans? The bird one, uh, Raven? All eyewitness accounts of her talk about, like, dark energy manipulation or whatever. Maybe you're magic, like her.”

Huh. That actually kind of made sense. He’d have to look into that. They turn a corner, and Ms. Marvel points out more heroes that he could possibly be related to. “...Doctor Light, although he does the opposite of you...” and then they turn a right, “...there’s The Shade, but no one’s heard from him in a while...” they turn another right, “...Scarlet Witch’s magic moves in the same way as your shadows, actually.” So engrossed in her theorizing is Ms. Marvel that she completely fails to notice they’ve stopped walking. 

Ms. Marvel looks up the sign and smiles a million-dollar-grin. “Hey, the Circle Q! I didn’t realise we ended up here. Come on, let’s get something to drink. I’m  _ parched _ .” She pushes the door open and Duke feels a blast of cold air hit his face. 

Eh. Might as well.

* * *

The first thing Duke notices when he enters the store behind Ms. Marvel is how the skinny white guy behind the counter who had been lazing around snaps to attention and nearly drops his phone in the process. Ms. Marvel just shoots him a quick smile and says: “Just here to grab some drinks, Bruno.” Skinny white guy, presumably Bruno, nods quickly, cheeks coloring as she goes to the back of the store to select something to drink. 

Duke just leans against the counter and watches Bruno not-so-subtly watch Ms. Marvel with the most ridiculously sappy look on his face. It’s almost worse than watching Dick flirt with Barbara. Almost. No one can see it behind his helmet, but he raises his eyebrows in amusement anyway. 

“So, Bruno,” he says casually, and the dude’s gaze shifts to him warily. “Are you into her, or something?” He’s mostly just asking because he wants something to do while Ms. Marvel debates the merits of sodas versus slushies, but Bruno’s reaction is actually honest. “Yeah,” he says dreamily, watching her struggle to open a fridge door. “I mean- No! No, no I'm not, we’re just friends, this is nothing like-” he catches the sarcastic tilt of Duke’s head and slumps against the counter. 

“Yes, fine, okay, I have a crush on Ms. Marvel. But she’s just so  _ cool _ ! Look at her! A real-live superhero. That indomitable will! Those gorgeous brown eyes! Her  _ smile _ ,” says Bruno, and Duke can almost see the hearts in his eyes. Yeesh. This poor girl just kept attracting nerds of the Tim variation. 

“Signal!” hollers Ms. Marvel. “You want something?”

“No. Uh, wait, actually yes. Get me a blue Gatorade?” 

“O-kay,” says Ms. Marvel, marching back triumphantly. “One blue Gatorade, one orange soda, and ooh, are those chips at half price? Two packets of chips. How much?”

Bruno’s back to standing ramrod-straight, seemingly frozen in time. “Uh, it’s-uh, on t-the house,” he manages to stutter out. Ms. Marvel grins. “Thanks, dude!” she says, and Duke can almost see this guy start to short-circuit, so he grabs Ms. Marvel by the arm and pulls her out the door. 

He watches them go, looking extremely relieved that he wouldn’t have to stutter in front of his crush any longer. She seems to not have noticed the effect she has on him, apparently, or if she has, she’s a very good actress. 

* * *

As it turns out, Ms. Marvel can do more with her shapeshifting powers than just use them to hide in creepy abandoned pizzerias. She can also get really big. Like,  _ really _ big. She grows to the size of an apartment building and picks Duke up, stashing him on the roof of the Circle Q building. Then she goes back to the normal size, but makes her legs grow like stilts so she can seat herself next to him on the lip of the roof, bringing them back to normal-human-length once she’s seated comfortably. From where they’re sitting, Duke can see a whole chunk of the city - it looks like a model version of the real thing. Little houses and three-story buildings under a powder blue summer sky is quite a change from intensely Gothic skyscrapers and never-ending smog. 

Ms. Marvel hands him a packet of chips and as he tears it open he says “Dude. You know that guy has a major crush on you, right?”

She scowls, crunching her chip with a vengeance. “I know. I’m trying to discourage him.  _ It isn’t working. _ ”

Duke has to laugh. “Maybe just don’t talk to him at all? He seems to lose all functionality when you even look at him.” She groans, and goes boneless. Literally boneless. It’s a little discomforting. “I just wish it could go back to the way it was before, you know? Ugh.” She leans back and ‘melts’ onto the roof, popping another chip in her mouth dejectedly. “I liked it better when we were friends.”

“What happened? He confess his love for you or something?”

“Sort of. We all thought we were gonna die, and he sorta-maybe-kinda told me he’d had a crush on me, like,  _ forever _ . And I was super preoccupied with trying to evacuate civilians and all that, and it was just a really weird day overall, y’know?” she says conversationally. Duke nods. He can relate - Gotham has more weird days where they’re all gonna die than not. He says as much, and Ms. Marvel sighs. “Cheers,” she says, sitting up and bumping her soda can against his plastic bottle, making a dull _ thunk. _

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asks, after a long sip of her drink. 

Duke fidgets. “I uh, I came here to check out that pizza place for any suspicious activity,” he answers. 

Ms. Marvel nods, holding her drink to her mouth. “You wouldn’t happen to be here on Red Hood’s orders, would you?”

“Psh. I don’t take orders from anyone,” he scoffs, and Ms. Marvel just turns her head towards him slowly, eyebrows raised, soda can still poised to her mouth. “Fine,” he concedes, “Hood asked me to check that place out. He wouldn’t even say why. How do you know Hood anyway?”

She takes a sip of orange fizz. “He’s asking you to check it out because a couple of months ago he broke up a small-time Gothamite drug operation there. I gave the police the location, but it’s possible not all of them were taken into custody, so I keep an eye on it in case they try to regroup there.”

“Huh.”

“Yup,” she says, popping the ‘p’.

“You and the Hood broke up a drug ring together,” says Duke.

“Well...he did the breaking, and the shooting,” she says, sloshing her drink and examining the contents of the can closely. “I covered for him when the police showed up. Then we had ice cream. And I think I pissed him off.”

“Huh,” repeats Duke. “How’d you piss him off? Not that it’s very hard, of course, but...”

Ms. Marvel taps her chin thoughtfully. “You know, I don’t actually remember. I know we were talking about brothers, and then I said something as I was leaving and he went kinda blank-faced-” she waves her hand in her face dismissively “- with rage and then I ran off.”

“Brothers, eh? That’s always a touchy subject with Hood,” he says. “Was he talking about Nightwing or Red Robin?”

She squints at him in confusion. “Neither,” she says. “Wait- Nightwing and Red Robin are Hood’s brothers? Hood’s  _ related  _ to the Robins? Like, legally? Hold on, hold on- are you another brother?” She crushes the empty soda can distractedly while she questions him and it leaves little cuts on her hand. “Shit!” she exclaims, looking at her hands.

Duke gets the feeling she’s connecting some puzzle pieces that should  _ stay  _ unconnected for everyone’s sake, so he scrambles for a change of conversation. “Oh my god! Your hands - do you need some gauze or something,” he asks, reaching for his inner jacket pockets. She shakes her head, holding out her hands. 

To his amazement, the tiny cuts on her palms stitch themselves together before Duke’s very eyes. Ms. Marvel winces and smiles as she does jazz hands. “Ta-da.”

“Healing factor? Lucky.”

“What, you don’t have one? That sucks. Being a meta should come with some perks, you know?” 

Duke shrugs. “There’s worse things than not having a healing factor. There’s this one guy who’s literally just a walking nuclear bomb, armed and ready to go.” 

Ms. Marvel shudders. “That sounds  _ awful _ ,” she says, shaking her head as if to clear away the thoughts. “Truly,  _ truly- _ ” 

“Ms. Marvel. You might wanna scoot a bit that way,” Duke cuts in, gesturing away from him. She complies, but then asks confusedly “Wait-why?”

As if on cue, a bird decides to shit on the spot Ms. Marvel was sitting on a second ago. She gasps softly, staring at the spot, then back at Duke, then at the spot again. “That,” he says to her surprised face, “is one of the perks of my powers.”

“You’re a bird poop detector?” she asks, voice incredulous.

“What? No!” She’s giggling a little bit, and Duke feels his face get hot. “I can see the immediate future sometimes and it helps with stuff like that, so, you’re  _ welcome _ .”

She wipes her eyes between giggles and puts a hand to her heart. “My  _ hero _ ,” she swoons dramatically. “How shall I ever repay you?” and she bursts into giggles again as Duke crosses his arms and looks the other way. She sighs, and when he looks back at her she’s still got a mischievous twinkle in her eye, but she’s back to being all business now. “I’ve never heard of anyone with shadow-and-precognition powers. You really have no idea where you got them from?”

“Neither of my parents were metas. I’m not sure how I got one power, let alone two,” he says, and she frowns. 

“That’s really weird, dude. And worth researching. If you’re not a human-type meta, then you’re something else. And that might leave you susceptible to a lot of stuff that you have no idea of. You don’t wanna risk getting some kind of, I don’t know, meta-sickness, and then suffering for it, you know?”

Duke hadn’t actually thought of it that way.

“See, for me, I found my people. If  _ I  _ get a magical alien disease somehow, I know there’s a special healing pod with my name on it, along with people who know how to treat me. If  _ you _ get a magical alien disease, well...” she trails off, tucking her hair behind her ear, and the gold bracelets on her arms clink. “Just be careful, is all I’m saying.”

Duke nods. “So you’re also saying that you're a magical alien, right?”

Ms. Marvel just snorts and rolls her eyes. “Yes. Totally. That is  _ exactly _ what I said.”

They sit there for a while in silence as Duke drinks his Gatorade and Ms. Marvel swings her legs against the building. There’s streaks of feather-light white clouds in the pale blue sky and sunshine makes him want to curl up like Alfred the Cat and take a nap. Instead, he turns to Ms. Marvel to ask her the most important question. “Hey, you know Red Robin, right?”

She hums. “Well, we’ve met, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What was he like?”

“He seemed...okay, I guess?” She turns towards him, her expression a strange mix of pained and confused. “I mean, dude’s got a truckload of issues, and very fragile ankles, but other than that he seemed fine. Why? Is he okay? Has he been replaced by some kind of imposter or something?”

Duke shakes his head. “No, he’s all good. So like, on a scale of one-to-ten how annoying was he? It's for a survey I’m conducting,” he adds when he sees her confused face, and she just blinks at him bemusedly. 

“A seven,” she replies, after a moment of consideration. “He has no self-preservation instincts or common sense. I found him trying to take down a jewelry thief on a twisted ankle and a fever.” She shakes her head, exasperated. “I hope he’s the only Bat pulling that kind of shit, for Gotham’s sake.”

Duke looks off to the side guiltily. “Well...”

She sighs and leans back on her hands. “I feel  _ so  _ bad for your doctor, dude.”

He laughs. “You and me both.”

“Also - his name is kind of stupid. It’s literally a burger brand,” she adds as an afterthought. "Burger Boy would be a better name. Less copyright infringement."

Duke shrugs. "He's changing it, after your little pep talk last month."

She brightens. "That's awesome!"

"Oh no," clarifies Duke, "it's worse now."

He tells her what it is, complete with the ' _ the most dangerous bird _ ' tagline. 

"...Oh."

* * *

Ms. Marvel drops him off near his bike a while later (literally, drops him out of her hand) and as he waves and watches her form retreat further into the city, he pulls out his phone.

_ 12:47 pm _

duke: I met her

duke: her outfit is nice

duke: and no, shes not evil

duke: she bought me a gatorade

tim: maybe she poisoned the gatorade

duke: ???why would she do that???

duke: also she made some valid points about finding out where my powers came from

duke: so I have a new solo mission now and ur not invited

tim: did you get more info out of her

tim: like what kind of metahuman she is cause she says shes not the normal kind

duke: I think she might be part alien or smth

duke: idk she was very confusing 

duke: whatever she is theres more of her kind in JC

tim: k

tim: also

tim: did she say anything about me

duke: :)))

duke: she thinks drake is dumb, burger boy

tim: ugh

duke: also you've got competition theres this other nerd who's already confessed his love for her

tim: WHAT

tim:...

tim: shut up shut up dont say anything

duke: ;))))

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you liked that! I had fun writing this cause Duke is like, comparatively level-headed as compared to the rest of them (I said COMPARATIVELY he's still a bat bahah) so he is a 110% justified in making fun of the rest of them
> 
> kudos and comments make my day! thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> and hey? thanks <3.


	7. Damian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damian finally shows up in Jersey City and runs into everyone's favorite shapeshifter. Also, he finds a cat. (Selina would be proud.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is Damian's chapter! Ta-da! The last introductory chapter for this little project. Hope you enjoy!

Damian Wayne Al Ghul is _not_ sulking. He is not. 

He’s an Al Ghul. Al Ghuls do not _sulk_ , they face their problems head-on by exacting swift and merciless vengeance on the person causing them strife. 

However, he is also a Wayne. And the Waynes have a longstanding tradition (going back about two decades, almost) of dressing up in animal-themed kevlar suits and solving other people’s problems to avoid their own. 

Sometimes, there is also the problem of not having anyone to exact vengeance on. Case in point? Today. He’d fought viciously with Father over some stupidly insignificant thing and Drake had been insufferably unrelenting in teasing him, and Grayson was off being incompetent in Bludhaven and wasn’t picking up his phone and Jon Kent was grounded and unable to visit. Brown’s oppressive cheer and Cain’s unrelenting silence had also not helped matters, Todd was out of town, and Thomas had been busy. Besides, he’s feeling unwarrantedly frustrated and spending time with people while in this state almost always resulted in hurt feelings or messy catfights, and Damian just wasn’t in the mood.

It’s the reason he’s hiding out in Jersey City rather than going to Titans Tower or Bludhaven or even just disappearing into Gotham - there’s no reason anyone would come looking for him here, and he doesn’t want to be found. He just wants some time away from everyone, because everyone is _irritating_. He'd heard Grayson tell Drake that it was a mostly-peaceful locale, and thus that made it one of the least obvious places that Damian would have gone. So he’d put on the Robin costume, left a vague note about leaving to go _somewhere_ , and slipped away without Batman noticing.

As Grayson would say, it has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. There have been worse days, but today feels especially bad, despite it not being any kind of death-anniversary or landmark mourning event. It just feels like there is an especially heavy rain cloud just hanging over his head, trapping the heat from the sun and making the air feel heavy with humidity, although that could just be the weather - it’s drizzling slightly, not enough to wash away the heat and clear the atmosphere of the stale feeling it had adopted. 

The water leaks through the leaves of the tree he’s sitting in and the calico cat he had climbed up here to help down crawls closer to him. He leans against the trunk of the tree, and the cat curls up next to him so he holds out his cape for the cat to duck under, and it starts purring.

He remembers when rain clouds were a good thing. He hadn’t been allowed to _play_ in the rain as other children had, but his training had ensured he knew how to fight equally well in all weather conditions and terrain. He remembers the cold water in his hair and on his lashes, the way the sun still shone coldly while it thundered, the sparkle of the raindrops on the katana in his hand. He remembers tamping down the sheer joy that erupted in his heart when the first few drops fell from the grey skies to focus on the fight at hand, counting the rain as a blessed reprieve from the endless heat of the desert. He misses it. He would almost go as far as to say that he missed the League, and Mother, except that he doesn’t. It’s more of an ache for something simpler - not better, but less complicated. He misses the places he grew up in, and he misses Grayson, and he misses not- not having this weird sensation of heart twisting into a knot. _Stupid,_ he scolds himself. What good is it dwelling on his feelings if he cannot fix them?

The cat hisses when Damian’s cape moves back by accident and it gets hit by a water drop. “Sorry,” he mutters, adjusting it so the cat is completely protected. It glares at him for a second, then curls up next to him again and goes to sleep. From his spot upon this sturdy branch, he can see the people of Jersey City scowling and scattering as they become more aware of the rain sliding off their phone screens and he studies the way their mouths form ‘O’s of displeasure when their hair gets wet. _No one here appreciates the rain_ , he thinks, scowling. It’s disgraceful. How do you completely disregard such a blessing? 

The rain increases in volume and velocity and Damian can feel the water trace the outlines of his domino as it falls on his face. It’s cold, but the air is still disgustingly heavy and rain is not yet enough to alleviate the heat. He’s considering his options here on how to get down - should it start thundering, it would not be safe to remain in the tree. However, he cannot leave the cat behind. He could gather it into his arms and jump down with it, but it’s quite a ways down and he would need his hands free to stabilise his landing. He could try climbing down, but the bark of the tree is now slick with rainwater and should his hands slip, he could seriously injure Raphael. (He’s going to call the cat Raphael.)

He’s still trying to decide what to do, how to fix this when a shape comes and stands beneath the tree. He squints down at it suspiciously, and has got one hand on his katana sheath when the figure _waves_? Did the Joker’s insipid excuse of an ex-girlfriend follow him to Jersey City? What other villain waved before attacking? Or maybe it’s not a villain. Maybe it’s a fan? He was not in the mood to deal with someone else. But before he can make a move, the figure shoots up until it’s at eye-level with Damian and it’s all he can do to not slide off the tree branch. 

“Careful,” says the figure, and Damian takes another look. It’s a teenage girl, brown hair, brown eyes, South Asian by her features, about sixteen, height - approximately twenty feet, or more?

He unsheathes his sword and points it at her, one hand still extending his cape to shield Raphael. “Who are you?” he growls in his best impersonation of Batman. The girl looks taken aback for a second, and then she laughs brightly. Damian scowls harder. 

“Maybe put that away, Robin. You’re going to hurt someone,” she says kindly.

“That is the _point_ ,” he seethes and the girl raises her eyebrows and nods patronizingly. “Of course it is,” she says, struggling to contain her laughter, “but do you think you could threaten me using puns _after_ I help you down?”

Puns? What- _oh._ Grayson!!

“Look,” says the girl, “the weather forecast says it’s supposed to rain increasingly harder as it gets later. I can help you down, because you’re clearly stuck. I’ll carry you, and you can carry the cat, and then we can all get out of the rain faster, how ‘bout that?”

“I’m Robin! I don’t get stuck. And maybe I appreciate the rain, unlike the rest of you _imbeciles_ ,” he says, pulling out the sneer for maximum hostility. She rolls her eyes behind her completely impractical blue mask. “Yeah, I’ve had enough of your snark, kid. Do you want my help or not?”

“Fine,” mutters Damian darkly, and scoops Raphael into his arms. He’s waiting to be picked up when the girl makes her _hands grow huge_ ?! And she holds one behind the tree branch he’s sitting on and gently pushes him into it with a shove from her giant finger. He lands in the palm of her hand with a soft _oof_ and she lowers him onto the ground and then pulls herself back to normal. She also drops herself to what is presumably her normal height (around 5 4”, which is comforting to see) and walks towards him. 

“So are you going to take the cat home, or do you want to drop it off at a shelter or in an alley or something?” she asks as they stand there under the tree. Damian shivers a little and pets Raphael. 

“It’s not an _it_ ,” he spits, “ _his_ name is Raphael and yes, I’d like to find a shelter for him.”

The girl nods thoughtfully. “Well, there are a few shelters around here, we can check if they have any space. I’m Ms. Marvel, by the way,” she says, holding out her hand, probably to shake his.

A ridiculous name for a ridiculous hero, thinks Damian as he glares at her. 

“Right,” she grins sheepishly, “your hands are too full of cat.”

* * *

The rain is increasing steadily as they walk from shelter to shelter, but no one seems to have any openings. Apparently most shelters had been getting animals in all evening, thanks to the weather. With each “No, sorry,” Damian grows more and more agitated. Surely there _had_ to be somewhere they could hand the cat off to? He didn’t want to leave Raphael by himself. It would have been preferable to take the cat home, but Gotham was a long way away and it would this endeavour would inevitably end in yet another fight with Father or the disappointed eyebrows from Pennyworth. Better to leave him here. 

Ms. Marvel seems to be growing frustrated as well. This is the seventh shelter that has closed the door in their faces, and she growls and thumps the doorframe, making the gold bangles on her arm jangle. “How hard is it to take in one more cat? One more?!” She curses, then takes a deep breath, turning to face Damian. “I’m sorry, kiddo. Maybe we can set up Raphael in a nice box somewhere high, make sure he’s protected from the storm?”

She looks and sounds truly apologetic, but Damian can feel tears making his eyes prickle behind his white-out lenses and he refuses to cry in front of a random girl over a stray cat. “No!” he shrieks, and before she can blink he’s pointing his katana at her wide-eyed expression, her hands held up in surrender.

“Put the sword _away_ , Robin,” she says frustratedly, wiping her dripping bangs out of her eyes. “There’s something else we can try.”

He sheathes his sword again, and watches as she cups her hands around her mouth. “LOCKJAW!!” When the only response is the hurrying passers-by giving her weird looks, she sighs and hollers again. “ _LOCKJAW!”_ What is this insufferable woman doing?

Damian peers at his surroundings suspiciously as the rain keeps pouring, and suddenly he hears barking from far away. Ms. Marvel claps her hands in relief. “Lockjaw!” she yells, her tone suddenly brighter than the sun, “ _idhar ao!_ ”

He turns to her in shock, because he hasn’t heard anyone speak that language in so long, just in time to see her be pounced on by a gargantuan beast and his first instinct is to punch it, but then he sees her laughing as the beast (a dog) slobbers all over her face. In his arm under his cape, Raphael has extended his claws to their full length out of fright, and Damian tries to calm him down while eyeing the dog apprehensively. She sits up, the dog still licking her with undimmed enthusiasm and suddenly Damian misses Titus very deeply.

She smiles tiredly, reaching up to scratch the beast behind its ears. “Robin, meet Lockjaw,” she introduces, and then gets up, tipping her head at the dog as an invitation to pet him.

Damian reaches out to pet the dog with his free hand, and Lockjaw leans right into it. Ms. Marvel crosses her arms and smiles at them smugly, and Damian looks away, feeling a light blush reach his face. “What do you plan to do with this hideous creature, Marvel?” 

To her credit, she doesn’t back down. She pets Lockjaw on the head and the pathetic canine slobbers some more, and she says “Well, this _hideous creature_ can teleport. We can put your kitty-cat in a box and tie it to him, and he can take Raphe somewhere warm, okay?”

It’s a good plan, except for - “How will you make sure that Raphael does not fall out during transit?”

She huffs, like she’s surprised he hadn’t thought of that. “Easy. We make him a dog-backpack. Watch.” She raps sharply on the door of the shelter that had turned them down, and a tired-looking woman appears. “Hi,” says Ms. Marvel brightly, over the ceaseless din of dogs and cats in the background. The woman does not respond. “Could you, uh, get us a cardboard box about ye big?” she asks, sizing an imaginary box with her hands. The woman disappears and returns with a box. “Thank yo-” she starts, but the door’s slammed in her face before she can finish.

Ms. Marvel frowns exaggeratedly at the door. “Rude.” Then she spins around, box in hand and points at his katana. “Sword, please,” she says, holding out her hand. Damian shies away protectively. _Mother_ gave him that sword, he is _not_ about to hand it to some second-rate superheroine- but she just rolls her eyes and makes a _gimme-gimme_ gesture with her hand. He scowls even harder than before, but hands her the hilt. 

“Thank- _you_ ,” she trills, then stabs it through each corner of the box as he watches in horror. He bites back the urge to shriek _that is not the intended purpose, you cretin_ but only because Grayson would appreciate it. Instead, he pets Raphe harder and the cat bites him in retaliation. She hands back the sword, and holds up the hole to her eyes. “Perfect.”

She turns to him again. “Robin, you have rope, right?”

Damian nods. “Rope, please,” she says looking back down at the box, holding out her hand. He hands her the rope. “Sword, please,” she requests, and he obliges because he doesn’t think he can fight her on it. Once she's cut the rope into two, she takes one piece and threads it through two holes vertically opposite each other and ties the two ends together. She repeats the process with the other two holes, and then holds it out for inspection. “Ta-da!”

She slips one loop over one of Lockjaw’s front legs, then the other, and the box itself is situated behind the dog’s head. True to her word she’s made a kind of dog-backpack. She stands back to admire her creation and smiles. “Okay, now settle Raphael in there, there ya go,” she says, and he sets the cat in the box. It curls up and goes to sleep, and Ms. Marvel pats the dog on the head, crouching near it as if to talk to it. 

“Okay now, Lockjaw, I need you to do me a favour, yeah? Take your precious cargo somewhere warm and dry, with lots of sun. Make sure he doesn’t fall out. I’m counting on you, soldier,” she grins, and Lockjaw licks her cheek in assent. She wipes her face exasperatedly, petting him one last time. “Off you go, ya big dumdum,” she says, and the dog lets out a happy _arroof!_ , leaps a couple of bounds and then vanishes into thin air, leaving only a loud _pop_ sound as any indication that he’d been there at all.

Damian’s cape feels so much colder without a cat cuddled to his chest. 

In the most pathetic of pathetic fallacies, everything flashes bright white and purple and the sky overhead booms with thunder, and it starts to rain cats and dogs and cows and turkeys. The two of them just stand there as it rains, and Ms. Marvel smiles and stares up at the clouds, lifting her hands in joy. 

“It’s thundering! I love thunderstorms. _Baarish ka mosum_ is my favourite _mosum_ ,” she says, smiling. “Everything is always cleaner and fresher after it rains, you know? Oh, what I wouldn’t _give_ for a good cup of _chai_ right now.”

He just looks at her. “ _T_ _um urdu bolte ho, hamare jaisa?_ ” he asks, the syllables clumsy on his tongue from ages of disuse.

She looks at him, a curious emotion flashing over her face. “ _Bolti_ ,” she corrects gently. “ _Urdu bolti ho, meri tarhan._ Yes, I do speak Urdu. You do too?”

“Yes,” he says quietly. “My mother spoke it.”

The sky flashes white-hot violet again, and the raindrops get fatter and faster as they fall. “Say,” Ms. Marvel says slowly, “I know a place that serves great _chai_ , if you wanna get out of the rain?”

* * *

It’s a cheap little place, he thinks, not worthy of an Al Ghul. Still, the chai is excellent, so he can’t complain. They’re at a little tin table inside the little restaurant-cafe thing, near a window where they can see the rain lash the world with a vengeance. The walls are painted in a garish manner meant to resemble truck art and there’s a fake rickshaw in the corner, and a banner proclaiming ‘ _INDEPENDENCE DAY SALE, 50% OFF ALL ITEMS!!!_ ’ with a bright green illustration of the Pakistani flag above the entrance of the store. The whole place smells like _tandoori_ and _biryani_ , and on the table in front of them are two cups of _chai_ and a plate of _pakoras_ , which Ms. Marvel is devouring without a second thought. Damian takes another dainty sip of his tea and it’s warm and flavorful and it helps shake off the chill of the rain a little bit. 

The atmosphere of the whole place is warm, really. It’s not exactly his culture, but it’s comforting nonetheless. 

“So,” says Ms. Marvel, dragging him out of his thoughts, “Your accent doesn’t exactly scream city boy. If I had to guess, I’d say you were from up north? Swat? Murree? Gilgit-Baltistan? I bet you speak Pashto,” she says, tipping her chair back dangerously. 

“I am from the northern region, yes, and I can speak Pashto. And Farsi. And Arabic.” So what if he shows off a little to her? It’s not like she’ll ever meet anyone like him again. 

“That explains your grammar,” she says dismissively, reaching for another _pakora_. 

“What is wrong with my grammar?” he asks defensively. 

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” she answers, taking a bite. “You’re just speaking a version of it that used more up north than actual pure Urdu - there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just a style of speaking.” Damian frowns darkly and she rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “ _Relax_ , Robin. Here, try one,” she offers, pushing the plate towards him. “Come on, they’re rain food! Perfect for warming you up on a rainy day. It’s tradition!”

Damian hesitates, but then reaches for one. They are actually not bad - he can taste the many spices mixed in the with the gram flour and the onion and the chili and the coriander - it’s more flavourful than anything Pennyworth has made in a long time, and it makes him miss Nanda Parbat and Khadym and Mother even more. Ms. Marvel watches him eat it, and when he reaches for another one she smiles. “See?”

They sit there for a bit, watching the rain, and Damian stealthily takes a few more and shoves them into his mouth, washing them down with the _chai_. He’s hoping Ms. Marvel doesn’t notice, but then she turns back to him and looks like she’s trying her very hardest not to laugh. “So you ate those like a starving man,” she says, eyebrows raised incredulously, “What, Gotham not have much in the way of _desi khana_?”

He shakes his head with a scowl and her tone immediately becomes sympathetic. “Oh, you poor kid. Have you been eating white people food this whole time?”

“Not the whole time,” he says, “My household does not exactly make eastern dishes, but I did find one restaurant that tastes like the foods I used to eat, back home.”

She frowns. “But you said Urdu was your mom’s language. Not to sound stereotypical, but doesn’t she cook anything that tastes of home?”

How do you begin to tell someone who has no idea of his background about his mother? The woman considered a monster by his brothers, an adversary by his father, a villain by the world? “I live with my father,” he says.

Ms. Marvel clicks her tongue regretfully. “So you live here without anyone from your home before? Must’ve been one hell of a culture shock, kiddo.”

“It was,” Damian agrees. “It is not like the places I considered home before.”

She nods appreciatively. “And do you miss it? Home, I mean.”

He thinks of the way people are so different here, how the air smells different and how you can’t see the stars like you could in Khadym, or how the snow here is black with grime when it used to be so white and fluffy in Nanda Parbat. How Arzu’s restaurant is the only place here that smells like cloves and cumin when the air in every Kabul spice market was thick with it, and how even as the son of a billionaire people here look at him as if he may attack them at any moment. He thinks of Mother and Grandfather, Father and Grayson, and he thinks of all the things that he sort-of-but-not-quite-really misses, and he says “I don’t know.”

Outside, another zigzag of blinding white light cracks the sky open and the world seems to go black-and-white for a second before the thunder resets the atmosphere. Ms. Marvel breaks off a piece of _pakora_ and nibbles at it thoughtfully. “I get that. I miss it sometimes,” she says. “I mean, Jersey City’s always been my home, but I’m attached to my-” air quotes “- _motherland_ , even if I don’t have a lot of reasons to be.” She shrugs. “It’s a part of me, I guess.”

Damian nods.

“I can’t imagine life without my mom’s cooking, though,” she continues. “I’ve never found anything tasting quite like it - like, she puts cinnamon and _badiyan_ in her biryani and that gives it this unique flavour - it’s _divine_ ,” she breathes.

“My mother used to make ox-blood soup,” says Damian quietly. “Sometimes she’d have the cooks make _suji ka halwa_ and _puriyan_ for breakfast, on my birthday. I miss that.”

Ms. Marvel props up her chin on her hands, elbows on the table, listening to him kindly and he carries on like a sentimental fool, talking of steaming platters of _pulao_ and hot _chapli_ kebabs and cool glasses of Rooh-Afza on hot days. She tells him about wedding banquets and the _biryani_ and _nihari_ they serve there, and the _shahi tukra_ and Umm Ali and _kheer_ and _kulfi_ for desert, and the knot in his heart loosens a bit, although he makes sure that no one else can tell. 

“I don’t know much about your family,” says Ms. Marvel after they’ve finished their _chai_ and _pakoras_ , “But I do know it can be challenging...finding a middle ground between cultures.”

“I’m Robin!” Damian asserts in his most threatening voice, “Nothing is challenging for me!”

Ms. Marvel looks like she wants to argue, but she carries on valiantly. “Regardless. Everyone needs someone on their side, and you remind me of my little cousins, so-”

“How so?” he cuts in, narrowing his eyes. She sighs and rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “Bratty, stubborn, and prone to violence,” she says, counting them off her fingers. “Sound familiar?”

Robin cannot argue with that.

“But,” she resumes, smiling warmly, “I can tell you’re a good kid. Here-” she hands him a scrap of paper, “-is my number. If you’re around and need help, or want advice, or just want to sit and drink some tea again, don’t hesitate to call, okay?”

Damian takes the paper carefully, like it’s precious, and tucks it into his utility belt. “Thank you,” he says stiffly.

An ambulance siren goes off in the distance, and it’s followed by another clap of thunder. Ms. Marvel gets up, the chair screeching on the gaudy tile floor, and she puts some money down on the table. “Hey. You’re my honorary little cousin now,” she says, reaching over to ruffle his hair. He scowls, but only a little fiercely. “Or maybe you’d like to be honorary-son-of-a-family-friend-that-comes-over-so-often-we’re-basically-cousins? Hmm. Nah,” she decides. “Honorary little cousin is _much_ easier to say.”

“Are you leaving?” asks Damian.

She nods. “If they’re using the sirens now, it means we’re in traffic accident territory. I better go see if I can help in any way. Immigrants,” she says, walking over to the door, “we get the job done.”

Damian turns around in his seat to face her. “Thank you,” he says, “for all of it. The cat, and- everything.” He sincerely means it. He hopes she can tell that too. 

Ms. Marvel smiles as she opens the door, her eyes crinkling as she gives him a small two-fingered salute. “Hey, us brown kids gotta stick together, right?” 

She waves good-bye and off she goes, into the pouring rain. 

* * *

As it turns out, Father had been worried sick and he’d completely forgotten about the argument., When Damian walks into the foyer of Wayne Manor, he gives Damian a tight hug. Pennyworth gives him a towel to dry off, Grayson calls him back and Titus shows up to slobber all over him. The knot in his heart dissolves for good, and he can breathe, perfectly happy where he stands in that moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idhar ao! - come here!  
> Baarish ka mosum - rainy weather  
> Tum urdu bolte ho, hamare jaisa? - you speak urdu, like us? ('us' like the royal we)  
> Urdu bolti ho, meri tarhan - you speak urdu, like me?  
> desi khana - desi food
> 
> It's a personal headcanon of mine that Damian, despite being ethnically Arab and East Asian, was raised for at least some part of his life in North Pakistan because Nanda Parbat is based off a real mountainous region called Nanga Parbat. One thing lead to another, and here we are, with almost an entire chapter about food! 
> 
> comments and kudos are adored, thank you so much for reading! hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> and hey? thanks. <3


	8. Kamala

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's finally Kamala's turn! About time, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, whew. This is the first multi-chap thing I've ever written, and holy shit I was not expecting all the love. You guys are the best, thank you so much! I hope you enjoy this last chapter! <3

Kamala Khan had not expected to meet Nightwing tonight. 

It was just another Friday, and she’d given up on her physics homework for the night, so she’d opted to run around the city a bit, to enjoy the weather. When she’d spotted the burning building she’d swooped right in to help, and to her shock there was already someone in there, trying to help a trapped woman escape. 

When the smoke finally cleared and the EMTs showed up, she realised that the man inside had been the one and only Nightwing, aka the Original Robin, aka the Boy Wonder, aka Leader of the Titans and a Justice League Member -  _ and he was in her city! _

She tried to play it cool, ended up calling him a dork (thank  _ God _ he wasn’t offended) and then invited him to have a post-patrol snack with him. He was very chill about all of it, and apparently he had a sister! Maybe she could meet her sometime? He did look very worried when she mentioned that she didn’t have a mentor, which was very sweet of him but she knows how to handle herself, okay? Besides, Captain Marvel’s got better things to do than train a random sixteen-year-old. 

In the end she had to cut it short because Ammi would be  _ so _ mad if she missed her curfew and so she runs out with a single-minded determination to get home before Mr. Nightwing stops her and hands her a card with his number on it. “For emergencies,” he says, and then he quotes Carly Rae Jepsen, so maybe Kamala wasn’t all wrong when she called him a dork. 

She gets home just in time to duck under the covers when Ammi comes by to say goodnight, and when she’s sure that the coast is clear, she pulls out her phone and enters the number and saves it with a selfie of her with him that she took when he wasn’t looking. 

* * *

A couple of days later she’s getting some cereal before heading to school and Abu is reading the morning paper. “Muneeba,” he says, shaking out the pages as Ammi sets down two cups of chai, “look at this.  _ Bludhaven detective catches runaway murderer in Jersey City _ ,” he reads. “Yahan bhi aa gaye hain ye kamine? He was responsible for  _ twelve _ murders, Muneeba. I thought we were far enough from that hellhole to keep us safe,” he says disapprovingly. 

Ammi clicks her tongue. “Why do such wicked people exist? Allah hum sab ko in logon se bachaaye,” she says sadly, shaking her head. “Kamala, jaldi karo, warna you will be late for school!”

Kamala looks up guiltily from her phone, spoon full of cereal halfway to her mouth. “Sorry Ammi, I’ll be out in a second, I promise. Hey, Abu, could I see that please?”

Abu passes her the paper. The story he was reading is splashed on the front page, a picture of two Bludhaven cops forcing someone into a cruiser, hands bound. Her eyes scan the page as chews her cereal, picking out random strings of information, “...wanted for twelve counts of murder, two charges of assault...caught Monday in an apartment on Fourth and...by BPD detective Richard Grayson...”

“...mala? Kamala! Jaldi, finish your food! The paper will be here when you get back!”

She’s still thinking about it as her mother shoves her out the door. Bludhaven, huh?

* * *

She’s scrolling idly through Tumblr one night as she lays in bed when she comes across a stats blog titled ‘HoodWatch’. The description says they’re tracking the Red Hood and his current body-count and alignment. Gruesome, but she goes through it anyway because she’s bored. 

* * *

About half a month later, the very same Red Hood she's been reading about walks into the defunct pizza place she’s collecting evidence in, and these dudes must recognize him because they pull their guns and start firing without a second thought. He takes most of them down, (non-lethally, of course) but they gain the upper hand, and the guards that she had bypassed on her way in pull out guns and give chase. She watches him take down all the leftover ones, threaten the one in charge, only to be cornered by one of the ‘braver’ ones, so she helps him out.

When she finds him again after he escapes the police, he’s smoking on top of the Kord Industries building without a care and he basically tells her she’s being super naive. She thinks maybe  _ he  _ should have that dated nickname, not his brother. But apparently he’s got some kind of heart in there because he apologizes when she talks circles around him. “Call me Jay,” he says, and when Kamala asks him if he means Jason, he gets kinda flustered, so that’s probably a yes. Or he’s over-acting to  _ make _ her think it’s Jason and it’s actually not!

Whatever. For a reformed drug lord, he’s pretty easy to make fun of, so she shows him to DeLuca’s Ice-Cream Palace, and he tells her the story of the brother he ‘met’. She tells him about Aamir, vaguely, and he laughs like he knows what it means to be the younger one. He goes into vindictive detail over this Richard’s fashion choices and favorite eras and she gets the feeling that maybe they’re estranged or something.

Eventually, she works up the courage to ask him if he’s adopted, but he sort of goes into this blank-faced rage that freaks Kamala the frick out, so she high-tails it out of there as fast as she can. Yikes. Guess Jay never really outgrew the stereotypical crime-lord temper, huh?

* * *

That’s two Richards she’s heard mentioned within a month of each other, she realizes one day as she’s doing her math homework. She ditches it, cause she’s almost done anyway and instead opens up a new page on her Notes app on her laptop. She doesn’t remember the cop’s last name, but his first name was Richard and he was from Bludhaven, like Nightwing. Maybe Richard was Nightwing’s police liaison or something? Jay’s brother was also a Richard, but Jay was from Gotham. Hmm. Ammi calls her down for dinner, so she hits save and decides to come back to it later.

* * *

It’s June and she’s just finished her finals, and Queen Medusa needs her for something at New Attilan. Apparently the Queen wants more details on Kamran and his powers, and their plan for Aamir. It’s not a pleasant set of memories, but she tries to be thorough in her debriefing. Ugh. She hates remembering she had a crush on  _ that _ guy - his stupid good looks and love of Bollywood and online multiplayer games and -  _ UGH _ ! Stupid Kamran, she huffs angrily, for being evil. Stupid stupid Kamala, she laments right after, falling head over heels for a villain.

On the bright side, she doesn’t have to step in the river to go home because she meets Black Bat and Black Bat has a  _ freakin’ _ Batplane? Like, that’s so awesome. 

Kamala does feel bad that she didn’t recognize her at first, but Black Bat doesn’t seem to take much offense (or maybe she does and Kamala’s just really bad at understanding her particular brand of non-verbal-ness). Either way, Black Bat is the coolest! She’s so good at fighting and she even teaches Kamala how to take down bad guys super quick. 

It turns out that she’s here to get some updates on JC for Batman, because of all the shit that went down in the last year or so. Batman has some  _ sweet _ tech by the way, she thinks to herself when Black Bat pulls out a holo-screen, rivaling that of Iron Man himself. Batman would have to be loaded to manufacture this level of tech. She does her best to explain all the weird stuff that happened after the Terrigen Cells activated as simply as possible to Black Bat and then they stop a mugging together which is  _ so _ cool.

They get pancakes after that and sure, Black Bat is graceful on the field, but she eats like a starving man.  _ Or a horse _ , whispers a voice at the back of her head. The voice kind of sounds like Mr. Nightwing.

* * *

When she gets home that night, she opens up her notes again, titled ‘THEORIES + EVIDENCE’ in bold letters across the top. She finds a couple of old pictures of the Batgirl/Orphan/Black Bat costumes, and she pastes them in next to the words 

“Nightwing’s sister? 

\- eats like a horse (his words not mine) 

\- bat-related, so both trained by Batman. 

x. no physical resemblance, but they are both short - sister in arms??? Figure of speech???”

She yawns loudly and shuts the lid of her laptop. That training session on the roof was hard work - she’s exhausted.

* * *

Early in July, she’s out patrolling before Fajr because she’s got nothing else to do and she hears an alarm blaring from one of the storefront-lined streets. To be on the safe side, she grows a bit and marches towards them, but it’s just a jewelry thief facing off against yet another vigilante. She makes quick work of him, hands him off to the police a couple of blocks away, and then returns to the scene of the crime where said vigilante can barely stand up straight because he broke his stupid leg. 

Red Robin, or Burger Boy, as she likes to call him, apparently busted his ankle, so she has to run and get some stuff from the pharmacy. This wouldn’t generally be a problem, except that when she comes back he’s passed out on the ground with a fever, so she has to go again and get some Advil. Of course, he can’t have the Advil without eating something first, Ammi would have her head if she tried otherwise, so they had to make yet another stop and get some crackers or something. Is that what you eat when you’re sick? Kamala hadn’t been sick in a long time. 

His eyes are closed (probably to avoid the nausea that comes with being carried around like an action figure) when she spots the darkened Red Robin sign. If she has to deal with a smelly, sick vigilante who might puke in her hand, she’s going to have some fun with it. 

Kamala cannot believe she has to coax a grown-ass vigilante into eating his crackers. He’s older than she is! God, Nightwing and Black Bat were  _ not  _ this stubborn. She feels bad almost immediately though because Red Robin is the sad kind of sick person. (She herself is a grumpy sick person, so she is way out of her depth.) She thinks he might be crying a little bit behind the mask, so she panics and pulls a Captain America and starts giving him a pep talk. It seems to work, and soon he is back home in Gotham, and she breathes a sigh of relief. Crying boys are  _ not  _ her forte.

* * *

Maybe Burger Boy was delirious from the fever when he said it, but Kamala remembers him mentioning that he couldn’t be sued for using the name because he owns Red Robin (or more accurately _aaaallll those burgers_ ), apparently. She pushes her reading glasses up her nose as she squints at the restaurant’s Wikipedia page, frowning as she reads the section about the ownership. 

She hopes she’s reading it right, because she’s very tired, but in summary, Stark Industries owns about 10%, Wayne Enterprises holds 20% and Lexcorp has recently bought 20% as well. The rest is divided between the original owners and assorted smaller shareholders, but that leaves the Bats to be associated with either Lexcorp or WE, based on the tech that Black Bat was carrying. She’s not surprised that Mr. Stark has shares in RR - the man loves burgers.

Aamir pokes his head in the room, jolting her out of her thoughts. “Kamala, Ammi said to go to sleep an hour ago. What are you still doing up?”

“Uhh...research,” says Kamala, because it’s technically the truth. “Just wanted to look up something I remembered.”

“Go to sleep, Kamala. And don’t forget to pray, if you haven’t already,” he says, strolling away with a typical holier-than-thou face. Kamala sticks her tongue out at him as he leaves.

* * *

Of all the crazy, unexpected things that she’s done in her life, putting  _ mehendi  _ on a crying ex-girl-Robin to distract her enough to talk about what was bothering her to stop her from jumping off a building was probably one of the stranger ones. She hadn’t even been on patrol, she’d just helped out a situation with a fire and then she was about to head home because she and Ammi were going to stay up and do their  _ mehendi  _ for tomorrow, but Spoiler’s so entranced by it and just this side of manic that Kamala doesn’t feel safe leaving her to her own devices.

She apologises to Ammi, tells her she’ll be home soon, and rushes back to the rooftop where she’d left Spoiler. Thankfully, she hasn’t done anything stupid yet, so Spoiler takes off one of her gloves and launches into her tale of woe. 

It’s a long and unhappy story, but it boils down to Spoiler being pushed away from vigilantism by every Bat because it was for her own good - until she became Batgirl, and even then the Batman of the time didn’t fully approve. There’s moments where Spoiler’s voice shakes with emotion - sadness or anger, or both, and there’s bits in the story that Kamala feels she’s definitely leaving out, but eventually it turns out that she’s conflicted about moving away from Gotham to start over.

Kamala helps her out by flipping a coin and then they go for waffles. It might’ve been nice to have a friend in the city, but she guesses she’ll never know now.

* * *

In the downtime between helping Ammi make biryani and getting Eidi, Kamala does a little research on Cluemaster. She only finds a few articles dating back to 2015, most of them run by the Gotham Gazette. The first article reads “ _ A would-be supervillain, Arthur Brown was a failed game-show host who decided to turn to crime _ ...” Kamala skims most of it, but a sentence at the end catches her eye. “ _ Daughter Stephanie Brown and wife Crystal Brown were unavailable for comment at the time of publication. _ ”

Stephanie Brown, hm? 

A quick search of her name reveals another Gazette article, a fluff piece on CEO Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne of Wayne Enterprises (wasn’t that a mouthful) who had been seen with Stephanie recently. The author, a Victoria Vale, believed the two to be dating. When asked about these rumours, Stephanie had told the reporter, in no uncertain terms, to “f*** off,” and “quit bothering everyone with your invasive questions, Vicki, no one gives a s*** about Timmy’s sad as f*** love life,” while Mr. Drake-Wayne sighed in the background.

She types out ‘CEO in possible relationship w/ Spoiler,’ on her ever-expanding THEORIES page, and adds the CEO’s name to her earlier note about WE possibly being related to the Bat-Clan. Then she hits 'sync to Phone' on her notes, because she can't cart her laptop everywhere, so it's the practical thing to do.

There’s more under Stephanie’s name, older articles from years past and there’s one that catches her eye - something about the unmasking of a Robin - but then she hears the doorbell and Abu calling for her to answer it, so she slams the lid of her laptop shut and rushes to open the door. 

* * *

The early August sunshine is quite nice, if a little warm. Makes her want to take a nap, but Kamala’s got an agenda today. Every once in awhile she checks up on that pizza place that she’d told the police about, in case the gang tries to make a comeback. She hates it because the dust always makes her sneeze to no end, but she’s just trying to be sure. 

It’s where she bumps into the Signal. For the first time in a while, she doesn’t have to introduce herself because he already knows who she is. It’s kind of validating, in a way. He’s one of the newer Bats, it seems, and this version comes with powers! Nice. Good for Batman. Except she vaguely recalls reading something about a no-metas rule in Gotham, so does the Bat not know, or...? He shrugs. “Once he saw I had powers, well, we just kinda rolled with it.”

Kamala likes him almost immediately. He’s less intense some of the others she’d met so far (cough-cough-Red Hood-cough) and while Kamala appreciates a flair for the dramatic, sometimes it’s just nice to share some chips and not get shat on by birds with someone embodies the same kind of nerdy spirit that she does. 

If only Bruno hadn’t been all  _ weird  _ in the store. She could tell the Signal was trying his hardest not to laugh, so she plastered the widest, brightest smile she could muster across her face and bought the stuff, getting out of there ASAP. She loves Bruno, she does. But she made it clear that she was focused on other things right now and she told him not to wait around for her. 

The rest of the day was pretty chill though. Nothing like lazing on top of a tall building on a warm day, trading advice and quips with another meta. She thinks that if she knew who the Signal actually was, she’d have a lot of fun hanging out with him as, y’know, normal-ish teenagers. 

All in all, not a bad day! Kamala would give this Bat-Encounter a solid 8.5 out of 10 on RateYourBatExperience.com, would like to meet again.

* * *

Her window’s open and the small fan on her desk buzzes loudly as she goes through her THEORIES page that night. The easiest place to start was Stephanie/Spoiler, who, by her own admission, had dated a Robin at some point. Since the only Robin active at the same time as her was Robin #3 - also known to Kamala as Burger Boy (but for the sake of her notes, Red Robin) - this meant that Robin #3 was the one Spoiler had dated, back in 2015.

Now, the matter of Jay and his Richard. Jay - most likely to be a Jason (maybe a James?), based on his reaction when Kamala asked about Jay being short for something, had a legally-related brother in Nightwing, and another ‘brother’ in Richard With The Questionable Fashion Choices. Nightwing, who happened to be located in Bludhaven at the moment, shows up to Jersey City the same weekend as a Bludhaven detective named Richard Grayson who caught the murderer. 

Her typing gets faster as the pieces start connecting in her mind, the clickity-clack of her keys getting faster as her thoughts speed up. Nightwing and Jay/Red Hood and Red Robin were all legally related, based on the way the Signal had tried to distract her when she’d asked him that question. Jay had only mentioned one annoying big brother, so it was very likely that Richard and Nightwing were the same person. This meant Richard Grayson of the BPD was most likely Jay’s brother with the unfortunate nickname. 

Both of these people were related to Red Robin, who, according to himself, owned Red Robin. Since the CEO of Lexcorp (and thereby owner of the 20% of the RR shares) happened to be Alexander Luthor (at least forty, and  _ bald _ ) and the majority shareholder of Stark Industries was, well, Mr. Stark, this left only Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne, seventeen-year-old CEO of Wayne Enterprises. Of course, there was always a chance that Burger Boy was one of the smaller shareholders, but with the technology that she had seen Black Bat using (who was presumably the ferociously hungry little sister Nightwing was talking about) they had to have some kind of major financial backing, so it made sense for the entire Bat-Clan to be funded by the profits earned from a major player like Wayne Enterprises. 

If her amateur detective skills were not wrong, and she hoped they weren’t otherwise she’d have to start all over again, the Bat-Clan was just another name for the expansive Wayne Family. And to put her theory to the test, she looks up the aforementioned CEO with bated breath.

The picture of him on his Wikipedia page doesn’t look too much like the disheveled vigilante she’d had to babysit that day, but maybe if she pictured him with washed hair -

Under the image is a list of his relatives, both deceased and alive. She skims past the names;

_ Janet Drake (mother)(deceased);  _

_ Jack Drake (father)(deceased);  _

_ Dana Winters (step-mother)(deceased). _

She feels a twinge of sadness - no kid should have this many dead people in their list of immediate family. Further down, the list carries on: 

_ Bruce Thomas Wayne (adoptive father);  _

_ Richard John Grayson (adoptive brother);  _

_ Jason Peter Todd (adoptive brother)(deceased);  _

_ Cassandra Cain-Wayne (adoptive sister); _

_ Duke Thomas (adoptive brother); _

_ Damian Wayne (adoptive brother). _

Kamala copies a photo of each official identity and pastes each one next to a corresponding hero-identity photo she’d pulled off Bat-sighting blogs and fanpages and Reddit threads. The only one she doesn’t have a current civilian photo for is Jay, because the handful that are on the internet are from right before he was murdered, and it feels wrong to sully the memory of a dead boy with an incredibly invasive investigation. Besides, she hadn’t been able to find any photos of Red Hood with his helmet off, so she’d just have to make do with guesswork. 

So she was right. All the skin and hair tones match, as do the ages. A speed read through each of their individual Wikipages reveals that Richard Grayson/Nightwing was a child acrobat (so that’s why he was so flippy); Jay-Hood is...dead (faked his own death maybe? Some kind of reality re-set?); Cassandra, who she’s assuming is Black Bat, was the daughter of an internationally wanted assassin (that explains her sneakiness); Duke Thomas was quietly adopted not too long ago (around the same time the Signal first appeared) and Damian Wayne...well, Damian is either not on the vigilante scene, or he’s Sword Robin.

Well, that’s enough detective work for the night, thinks Kamala, switching tabs. Time to work on some fanfic. Her readers are waiting!

* * *

Okay, so the rain made Sword-Robin’s hair all soft and not-spiky, and he looks a lot like his civilian ID now. Kamala has to bite back a lot of what she says because she doesn’t want to spook him - the kid seems aggravated enough that he needed help without her revealing she knows who he is. 

He seems extremely hostile, going “I’m Robin!” at every opportunity (okay, okay, it was twice, but Still) and he’s incredibly fond of brandishing his katana at any problem he seems to come across, including her. But he’s still a kid, and the way to any kid’s heart is food - Kamala learned that handy trick when trying to survive her hyperactive baby cousins at family gatherings. It works like a charm, but it also makes her really really sad to learn that Damian’s an outlier in terms of ethnicity and culture in his family. She was born and raised here, and she still feels self-conscious about not fitting in with other people at school but at least she has Ammi and Abu and Aamir. This kid’s got no one to make him biryani, or to gossip in Urdu with about everyone he hates, or make fun of racists with. 

That’s probably the reason she pulls a Nightwing on Nightwing’s little brother and hands him her phone number, which he thanks her for with startling sincerity. Sure, the kid’s kind of a brat, but damn if her heart hadn’t melted when she saw him stuffing his face with pakoras, she thinks fondly as she leaves to go follow the sirens.

* * *

The existence of Sword-Robin essentially completes the puzzle that is the Bat-Family’s identities. Damian/Robin’s mother is listed as Talia Al Ghul and while Kamala has no clue who that is, it sounds much more eastern than Bruce Wayne, who is as white as can be. Incidentally, Batman is so pale that many, many, eyewitness accounts claim that he’s some kind of vampire or ghost and not just a man in a bat-suit. (Does that make him a furry? Nevermind.) Point is, all of the evidence that Kamala has compiled in her extremely thorough (read: haphazard) investigation points to  _ Bruce freakin’ Wayne  _ being  _ The  _ Batman. 

Kamala has to fight very hard not to squeal out loud.

* * *

It’s September now, and Kamala has passed a whole month without coming into contact with any more Bats. For whatever reason, things had gone back to relative normalcy after that freak storm mid-August that she’d sat out with Robin. Now, September was nearing an end and her school (in conjunction with Stark Industries and Wayne Enterprises) had organised a couple of trips to their respective campuses, with a special focus on the R&D sectors. The WE trip was this weekend and the SI trip in April, and best of all, they were for free! Abu was of the opinion that “Wayne and Stark are just stuck in a publicity battle, beta, they have to prove they aren’t like that...naam kya tha uska...haan! Jeff Bezos, aur woh dusra kamina jo Lexcorp chalata hai,” he’d said over his newspaper. “It’s all business, beta.”

Ammi had gently rolled her eyes and said “Some things can be out of the goodness of people’s hearts, Yusuf, it doesn’t  _ have _ to be all business.”

Aamir had sniffed self-righteously and then said “Their charity would count for so much more if they were Muslim,” and then Abu had looked over, eyebrows raised and said “At least they  _ have  _ jobs, Aamir! I don’t see you making any money,” while Kamala and her mother locked eyes and sighed simultaneously. 

But Kamala had been allowed to go on both trips, and both Nakia and Bruno were going to be there as well! Things had gotten better with Bruno now that he was dating Mike, and Kamala and Nakia were going to be rooming together, which would be super fun. 

Friday morning came, and as she was zipping up her roll-along suitcase and putting on her backpack Ammi was wringing her hands and Abu stood there with a stern expression. 

“Don’t leave Nakia’s side - and don’t let her wander off by herself!” says Ammi.

“Keep your phone ringer on at  _ all  _ times, is that clear?” asks Abu.

“And no going into boys’ rooms! Bilkul bhi nahi, Kamala!” admonishes Ammi. 

Kamala sighs, and smiles. “Yes, of course, and  _ ew _ Ammi why- why would I do that?” she says, wrinkling her nose. “I have to go. I love you! I’ll see if I can get Aamir a job as a receptionist or something,” she jokes, and then gives each parent a hug and kiss on that cheek. “See you tomorrow!”

“Khudahafiz, meri jaan,” says Ammi, waving. 

“Allah Hafiz, beta. Call us if you need anything,” says her father, smiling.

Kamala grins, and runs out of the house to join Nakia outside, who’s been waiting ten minutes now.

* * *

The first day is pretty fun. They visit Wayne Tower around four p.m. after settling into their rooms and they’re served snacks post-tour, tea and biscuits and scones and other various delicious-looking baked goods. Kamala’s just in the middle of trying to choose between a strawberry tart and a lemon tart when she hears a door swing open and Red Robin’s voice say “So, everyone enjoying the snacks?

Frozen, she turns to look at the front of the room where Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne is standing, dressed in what is probably Armani, hair slicked back, demeanor calm and collected. Nakia elbows her in the side. “Please don’t say you’ve fallen in love with him or something,” she hisses quietly. Kamala thinks of the stink of garbage water and sweat and his sweaty hair and his ability to be condescending even while sick.

“No,” Kamala whispers back, eyes still fixed on him, “not now, not ever.” Nakia exhales in relief.

“Thank God,” she whispers, leaning into Kamala, “you have the worst taste in men.”

“Hey!” laughs Kamala. “That was  _ one  _ time!” 

Nakia giggles quietly. 

At the front of the room, Mr. Burger Boy is making idle conversation to the room at large. “...nly a year older than you guys, actually. Think of me as a friend. You can ask me anything.”

People throw up their hands instantly. “Hmm,” says Tim. “You there, in the white shirt?” Nakia, Bruno and Kamala all look at each other and stifle a laugh behind their hands. He’s talking to Zoe’s new boyfriend, Alan - star athlete, class clown, a kind-of-but-not-really-a-bully type of guy. 

“Hi, Mr. Drake-Wayne, I wanted to ask- what does it feel like being this rich yet still unable to get a girlfriend?" 

Tim colors slightly and laughs a tad nervously as the entire group bursts into laughter. 

"Alan!" exclaims Ms. Ashton, scandalised, and Alan shrugs, curling an arm around Zoe. "What?" he says, "I'm genuinely curious."

As the laughter dies down, Tim rubs his hands together and tries again. "Anyone else have any other questions, ones not related to my personal life?" he asks, his grin slightly more forced now.

The class continues to be entirely unhelpful in this matter, and every question asked is somehow more ridiculous than the last. Their teacher looks like she might genuinely explode in anger, and Kamala can already hear her picking out people to yell at about embarrassing her after the tour is over, so she keeps her mouth shut and watches the chaos unfold. 

“Why don’t we try someone else,” repeats Tim for what seems to be the twentieth time. “Uh...anyone? What about you?” he asks, pointing at Kamala. 

“I-uh, I don’t really...” starts Kamala, looking to the left to avoid his eyes and accidentally locking onto Ms. Ashton’s desperate gaze, beseeching Kamala to return the room to some semblance of decency. She sighs. “Actually, I did have a question,” she says, her mind scrambling for a real question, “uh, I wanted to ask, uh, why do all the WE-owned toy companies never sell Superman dolls?”

Ms. Ashton facepalms with an audible smack as CEO Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne frowns at something. “Gothamites hate Superman,” he says absently, eyes narrowed at her. “Sorry, do I know you? You look very familiar,” he says, and Kamala feels her eyes go wide in horror. Thank  _ God _ she’s far too brown to blush. 

Luckily, Nakia comes to her rescue. “I have a question,” she says sharply, “what proof do you have that your welfare schemes are actually doing good in Gotham? Crime stats rise every year...”

Kamala breathes a sigh of relief and goes back to trying to pick a tart while Tim and Nakia wage a war of words about fostering real change in disadvantaged communities versus the publicity stunts that got featured regularly on the news.

Bruno elbows her from the other side. “You better watch out, Kamala,” he says with a grin. “Someone’s got a crush on youuuu,” he sing-songs.

Kamala resists the urge to slap him across the face.

* * *

“Kamala! You need to tell me the truth. Why did he single you out? How do you know each other?” Nakia asks sternly, once they’re back in the privacy of their hotel room. 

Kamala flops face-down on the bed nearest to the window. “Nakia. I  _ swear _ , he has no idea who I am.” Technically, she’s not lying. Mr. Drake-Wayne has no clue that she is Ms. Marvel - Red Robin might, though, and that might be a problem. 

She rolls onto her front, propping herself up on her elbows. “He probably just got me confused with some other brown girl he met, that’s all. You know what white boys are like,” she says, rolling her eyes. 

Nakia nods begrudgingly. “White boys are the worst,” she says sagely. “Except for Bruno.”

“Except for Bruno,” agrees Kamala. “Hey, wanna watch a movie? I’m not really in the mood for dinner.” She had kinda gorged herself on the snacks from the conference room, and seeing Red Robin had kind of killed her appetite. Nakia agrees, and then they settle down to watch Mean Girls because Mean Girls is freakin’ funny as hell. 

Nakia’s asleep by the time the movie ends, and Kamala would be too except she hears a siren ring out through the noisy Gotham night-time. She shuts her eyes and ignores it -  _ not her city, not her problem _ , she chants in her head,  _ not her city, not her probl- _

The sirens get louder. Kamala hears what sounds like someone yelling through a loudspeaker, presumably the police. It’s muffled by the distance, but the intention is clear. Someone’s about to do something risky, and it’s probably fine, the police have it handled, the city’s got what could almost be considered an infestation of Bats - so she squashes the nearest pillow around her ears and tries to go to sleep.

And then she hears gunshots.

She’s up without a second thought, pulling the suit on and leaping out the window, and the only thought running through her head is “ _ Ya Allah, please don’t let me be too late-” _ . She takes to the rooftops, stretch-running as fast as she can until she comes to a screeching halt right in front of St. Luke’s Hospital, according to the sign on it.

The building is surrounded by helicopters flashing their spotlights on a single spot on the roof of the hospital, focused on a pair of figures standing near the edge. Police have cordoned off the area in front of it and are directing people away from, yelling into walkie-talkies and shooting worried glances at the pair on the roof. 

A graying man in an overcoat and square glasses stands at the base of the hospital holding a loudspeaker with one hand and a smoldering cigar in the other. Even from here, she can see the glint of his police badge as it catches the spotlight and way his furrowed brow glistens with sweat as he stares intently up at the building.

“This is Commissioner Gordon. Put your weapon down and step away from the hostage,  _ crrk _ ,” the man bellows into the loudspeaker. “I repeat:  _ put your weapon down _ .”

Kamala decides it’s time to get a better look. She stretches (carefully, carefully) across the buildings until she’s close enough to the hospital to see. The wind from the helicopter blades above her makes her hair fly into her face as she slips into the shadows to avoid being seen by the police. There’s a man wearing a vest clumsily strapped with explosives, holding an AK-47 with one arm and a scared little girl with the other. She’s very obviously been crying and when she sobs loudly and his fingers dig into her shoulder, Kamala has to swallow hard to keep from launching herself at him. The man’s eyes look crazed, his face pale, his straw-like hair sticky with sweat as he points the gun at the little girl’s head. Kamala’s ears are ringing with panic and rage, and she only catches the end of his villainous monologue, “...ld you! I warned you there’d be consequences, and now all of you will  _ pay _ ,” he spits, moving the gun closer to the girl’s temple. His hand on her shoulder becomes a chokehold around her neck, and her little fingers scrabble at his arm uselessly. 

The Commissioner visibly blanches. The hand that was holding the cigar clenches, hard, and Kamala idly wonders if he has a daughter. He makes a signal at the men surrounding the building, and she suddenly hears the collective  _ click _ of a dozen guns ready and aimed. 

“Nuh-uh, Commissioner,” says the man on the roof, grinning maniacally. “You shoot, and my vest and all the C4 I have stocked behind me goes off - I die, she dies, and the hospital  _ burns _ ,” he cackles, and Kamala’s blood runs cold. So  _ that’s _ what the piles of stuff behind him were. 

She sees the man’s eyes dart side-to-side, sees the way his mouth morphs from an insane leer to a paranoid scowl, sees the way the tears drip down the girl’s face and stain her pink Hello-Kitty t-shirt, and she leaps into action.

* * *

Her plan is simple. But her plan did not include getting shot. 

It goes like this: 

The building she’s standing on is not far from the hospital itself. The front of the building has a glass awning that is directly under where the guy is standing, and she’s aiming for a spot on it that will  _ just _ be in his aim. 

She jumps and shrinks herself mid-air, and she lands perfectly. Definitely a blessing.

Now for the tricky part. This guy’s got an AK-47 on hand and he’s clearly not shy about using it. Kamala needs to distract him enough to let go of the girl so she can grab her and make a break for it. The police can deal with him afterwards. 

Before she grows back to full size again, she says a little prayer and takes a deep breath. This is more dangerous than anything she’s ever done, but if God is willing (and she’s fast enough), she’ll make it. 

She yells “ _ EMBIGGEN!”  _ and there’s a yell of “ _ who the f*** is that?! _ ” from the police that drags his attention to her. There’s a spotlight on her and the helicopter moves right above her, whipping her hair into a storm. Immediately, she stretches her torso towards the left and he aims away from the girl, and she stretches her arms towards the kid, reaching to pull her out of the chokehold. It’s hard keeping him focused on her and avoiding the shots, swerving left and right and weaving her snake-like self to dodge the bullets, but she thinks she’s doing a pretty good job. Her hands grip around the arm holding the girl and he stops firing for just a moment, just enough to stare at it before Kamala pulls it in the opposite direction for an arm’s natural position freeing the girl.

This is where it all goes wrong. 

With a sickening crack of the man’s arm, the girl is free and she immediately starts running towards the fire escape (smart kid!), but her captor fires one last shot in reaction to his arm being broken. Kamala doesn’t see where it goes, but she feels a searing white-hot pain in her left bicep.

The gunman falls over the lip of the building, fainting in pain as the GCPD swarm the building to catch him, and Kamala has to make a hasty exit before one of them can catch and question her. Shit, she thinks as she runs,  _ SHIT _ ! She’s got that trip in the morning and Nakia is gonna be so mad if her field-trip buddy bleeds out in a gross alleyway. 

She leans against a wall, tears springing to her eyes. The rest of her body is un-shapeshifted, but her left arm flops behind her, long and utterly useless. Who the hell is she going to call for help all the way in Gotham City? Abu ya Ammi spring to mind, but they wouldn’t make it here in time. Bruno was probably asleep... _ shit _ , why did she think this was a good idea again? She pulls out her phone and scrolls, and then she sees a familiar selfie for a contact labeled with a little bluebird emoji. 

She hits dial, chanting  _ pick up pick up pick up _ \- 

“...Hello? Nightwing speaking. How can I help you?” She almost sobs in relief. 

“Hey, uh, Mr. Nightwing? I-uh, I kinda got shot, and I-,” her voice wobbles, “I could re-e-a-lly use some first aid right now,” she chuckles weakly. The world was starting to spin. Was that a side-effect of blood loss? It was, wasn’t it?

Nightwing curses. “Okay, stay where you are, kiddo, I’m coming to get you. Put pressure on the wound-” she hears a motorcycle kick into gear “-and I’ll be there soon. Keep talking to me, what happened? Where are you?”

Kamala grunts. “Two blocks down from St. Luke’s hospital,” she says, gasping in pain. “In an alley across from a-” she squints at the neon sign across the street “-24-hour Karaoke? Sorry, m’eyes’s kind-a messin’ with me,” she mumbles into the phone.

Dark spots dance across her vision as Nightwing says something concernedly through her phone’s speaker.

“Sorry, wha’ssat? Didn’ quite hear whatcha’ said,” she slurs, slumping downwards towards the filthy ground. 

The last thing she hears before passing out is Nightwing yelling “...tay awake, Ms. Marvel, stay awake!” and everything goes dark. 

* * *

A jolt of white-hot, magnesium-in-a-bunsen-burner-hot pain ripping through her arm jolts her awake and she shoots up, trying to make sense of her surroundings. 

“Where- where am I?” she gasps, panicked. There’s a pair of hands on her shoulders, grounding her. When she looks up, she sees a worried Nightwing staring back at her. 

“Easy, kiddo,” he says with a half-smile. “You lost a lot of blood.”

“Where am I?” she repeats more clearly, looking around. She’s seated on a medical cot, in what seems to be a professional first-aid area. There’s stalactites - stalagmites? (she always mixes them up) on the ceiling, and dim LEDs casting a bluish-white glow over the whole place. She risks a look at her injured arm (still super stretched out and floppy, gross) and there’s an old guy in- is that a butler outfit? sitting next to it, near a tray holding a scalpel and tweezers and gauze, and some antiseptic and cotton.

“Welcome,” says Nightwing with a flourish, “to the Batcave.” When he steps back to make a little ‘ _ ta-da _ ’ motion with his hands, she sees The Signal, Spoiler, Red Robin and Robin all watching her from a distance. Kamala’s vision is not doing her any favours right now, and from this distance it’s impossible to discern their expression in the dim lighting. 

“Miss Marvel,” says the old guy, “if you would not mind shapeshifting your arm back to normal, so that I may remove the bullet?” 

Kamala blinks, trying to register what the dude’s saying. “I can’t,” she responds, a little hollowly (get it?). 

Robin walks up to her bedside, nose tilted up in a display of unaffectedness. “ _ Tt.  _ Such subpar heroism is not tolerable, Marvel.” Kamala just grins evilly and reaches up with her uninjured arm to ruffle his hair thoroughly and he squawks with indignation. “ ‘Sup, squirt? Kya haal chaal hain?”

Rob- _ Damian _ , she corrects, scoffs as he runs his hands through his hair to smooth it down. “Better than  _ you, _ Marvel.”

Richard looks curiously at his little brother, like he wants to ask something, but stays silent.

Sig-Duke comes to stand at her injured side, looking at her curiously. He’s wearing a different version of the suit on today, notes Kamala. More armor, and the helmet’s got little bat-ears. Awww. “Don’t you have a healing factor though?”

Kamala shakes her head. “Can’t heal while shapeshifting,” she says resignedly, “and can’t shapeshift while not healed. I think maybe you might have to remove the bullet like this,” she says to the old guy, “sorry about that.”

The butler dude nods. “Very well, Miss Marvel. Try not to scream, please - it upsets the bats.”

“There are _real-life BATS_ in the Bat-caaAA _AAAAAAAAA_ -” shrieks Kamala, seeing stars in daylight when the tweezers enter the wound to search for the bullet, clamping a hand over her mouth to stop the scream. Richard grips her shoulder and Duke grimaces in sympathy - Stephanie picks up her floppy-arm hand and Kamala squeezes her purple glove with the intensity of a thousand suns. Even Damian looks a little disturbed, which makes sense, ‘cause he’s like, twelve. 

After what seems like hours, even though at most it was only a minute or so, Mr. Butler-Medic pulls out the bullet and drops it onto a stainless steel dish with a loud  _ clang! _ and disinfects the wound before wrapping it. She lets go of Stephanie, shooting her a grateful glance as she feels the patch of injured flesh knit itself together under the gauze. She waits until her arm feels as good as new, and then she snaps it back to normal. 

Stephanie smiles widely, or, well, Kamala thinks she does (it’s hard to tell with the half-face mask). “Finally. No offence, but your arm looked really gross that way.”

Damian clicks his tongue. “Pennyworth,” he says to the butler, “Nightwing said she had lost a lot of blood. Should I get her something to drink?”

The butler-medic, presumably Mr. Pennyworth, wipes his hands clean on a towel and gets up. “No need to trouble yourself, young sir. I’ll go get something for Miss Marvel to get her strength back up.” As he leaves, Kamala grins at Damian. He huffs and looks away.

“Awww, Damian,” she coos, “I didn’t know you cared.”

Kamala can almost hear the record-scratch when everybody freezes. 

Nightwing turns to look at her, face unreadable behind his blue mask. “What did you call him?”

_ Shit _ . Luckily, they’re all distracted from any further questioning because they hear tires screech and Batman, Black Bat and Red Hood all get out from the Batmobile and come over to the med-bay. Kamala gives him a little wave from where she’s sitting on the cot and he levels an unspoken question at Nightwing who holds up his hands and says, “I can explain. But first,” he says, turning to Kamala, “I’d like an explanation from you, Ms. Marvel.”

“Uh...”  _ Think Kamala, what would Miles do? _ “Who’s Ms. Marvel?”

Nightwing crosses his arms and tilts his head reproachfully at her, like Aamir does when he finds her sneaking into the freezer for a late-night ice-cream snack. “Very funny. Seriously, Ms. Marvel. I’d-” he looks around at his family “- _ we’d _ like an explanation for how you know Robin’s civilian ID.” Batman’s standing at the foot of her cot, glaring at her, and Black Bat standing next to him. Damian’s got a hand on his katana and Spoiler’s reaching for her nunchucks. Duke’s backed away from her now, and is kinda standing behind Stephanie. Timothy and Jason are the only ones not holding their weapons - Tim is standing a little away, arms crossed like Nightwing and Jason’s trying to...leave, it looks like. 

Kamala sighs. “You wanna know the truth?”

Nightwing looks faintly amused. “Is that a trick question?” 

“The truth would be your best course of action,” growls Batman.

Kamala considers this. “It’s Jason’s fault,” she says, pointing at the Red Hood with her newly-healed arm. Every head swivels to face him. “I was just hanging out in Jersey City and he shows up and when I asked whether to call him Mr. Hood or Mr. Red, he said to call him Jay. So there. Now if you’ll excuse me-” she says, swinging her legs off the bed to stand up, “-I have to get goi-i-i-” and suddenly she’s horrifically woozy. Nightwing catches her by the shoulders and pushes her into sitting back on the bed. “Slow down, kiddo. And Jason, get over here and explain what the hell she’s talking about, please.” Batman grunts in agreement.

“Go  _ fuck yourself, _ Dickhead. I didn’t do shit. I’m outta here,” yells Jay, and she hears his heavy boots echo as he (presumably) stomps to get leave.

“Master  _ Jason _ !” 

Mr. Pennyworth strides in, holding a cup of something and a plate of cookies, setting them both down on the bed near Kamala. She can smell the sweet warm smell of chocolate from the plate and the cup, the richness almost intoxicating. 

“Is that any way to address your brother, in front of a guest no less? Come here this instant, young sir,” he says sternly. “Yes, Alfred,” grumbles the Red Hood, coming to stand by Duke. Kamala’s starting to feel a bit crowded, actually.

Mr. Pennyworth pushes the plate closer to her, and she picks one up. “Mm! Chocolate-chip!” she exclaims through a mouthful of cookie. He smiles as she picks up another one. “Why don’t you try explaining what happened, Miss Marvel, how you came to be aware of young Master Damian’s identity?”

Kamala swallows. “Well,” she says, reaching for her phone to open up the THEORIES page, “Nightwing came to JC and said he was from Bludhaven. Two days later-” she scrolls down to show them the article ”-BPD arrests a murderer there. Then Jay shows up, tells me about the older brother he ‘met’ who had an...unfortunate nickname, a.k.a. Richard. Then Black Bat showed up, on your-” she points at Batman “-orders, and Nightwing had mentioned something about a sister. Then-” here she pauses for breath and takes another cookie. The Cave is silent except for her munching. “Mmh,” she says, “These are so  _ good _ !”

Mr. Pennyworth smiles. “Thank you, young lady.”

“Anyway,” Kamala carries on, “I met Red Robin soon after, and he mentioned that he  _ owned _ Red Robin, right, and I was like what? And it turns out that Wayne Enterprises has stocks in RR, actually. Then Spoiler came by-”

“Wait, wait. Why did Spoiler go to Jersey City?” asks Tim, finally stepping forward. 

“I was looking to move to JCU,” says Stephanie shortly. “I chose to stay here with you losers,  _ you’re welcome _ .”

“Yeah. So then she said that she became Spoiler because she felt guilty for Cluemaster, and then once I found that she was actually Stephanie Brown who’d dated Robin numero tres, a.k.a Red Robin, it wasn’t so hard to figure out that the dude Victoria Vale keeps hounding was the same one that Spoiler had dated. Robin also showed up, and that sealed the deal, basically.”

They all look slightly shell-shocked. But she’s not done yet. 

“It all really came together when the Signal told me you guys were all legally related. Although,” she says to Jason, “Wikipedia says you’re dead. But I don’t think zombies like Neapolitan ice cream. What gives?”

Jason laughs bitterly. “I did die, Ms. Marvelous. Didn’t stick.”

Kamala keeps her face carefully still. She can freak about that later. “Huh,” she says. “Anyway, I looked up Tim after I found out about Stephanie, and then everything just kinda fell into place, y’know? You can take your mask off, Mr. Wayne. The secret’s safe with me.”

Jason’s the first one to speak. “You said this was my fault. How is it my fault?”

“I wasn’t interested in finding out who you guys were until you mentioned your brother’s name,” she says with a shrug. “You don’t have to worry though, honest. I just gotta get back to the- where I’m staying.”

“After you finish the hot chocolate,” says Mr. Pennyworth. 

“So we can take off our masks, right?” asks Duke, and without waiting for an answer he takes off his helmet. “Phew.”

Tim comes closer, eyes narrowing. “You look familiar. Like,  _ scary _ familiar.” She holds her breath as he examines her face with calculating eyes. “I could’ve sworn I’ve seen you somewhere, like, today.” He shakes his head. “Whatever. That thing I said about the burgers...you remembered that?”

Kamala nods. 

“So...you remember everything else, too.” says Tim flatly. Kamala nods again.

“You figured all of that out by yourself?” asks Mr. Wayne, taking off the cowl. His face betrays almost nothing, but Kamala would swear that he’s bleeding curiosity. 

“Yeah, but your kids helped,” she says with a grin, and almost all of them look away, some sheepish, some embarrassed, God, Mr. Wayne really had too many kids. 

“Well,” he says in a deep-not-growly voice now that he’s out of the cowl, “I trust you that you’ll keep this information to yourself?”

“ _ Wallahi _ , I won’t tell a soul,” says Kamala, and she means it. 

“Hnn,” says Mr. Wayne. “You’ve got good detective skills, Ms. Marvel. Keep at it and you’ll become an excellent crimefighter.”

Kamala beams at the praise. The others look various shades of betrayed and horrified as he turns to walk away. “What?” she says, genuinely confused. 

“ _ Batman _ just said ‘good job’ to you. You know how hard it is to get him to say anything at all?” explains Tim. 

“I can’t believe it. She’s been here for five minutes and he already likes her better than he ever liked me,” grumbles Stephanie. 

“Welcome to the family, dude,” says Duke, holding out his fist for a fist bump. 

Cass just smiles.

“Isn’t there a law against adopting kids with parents already?” asks Jason.

“They’re kidding,” whispers Richard conspiratorially, “but I’d keep an eye out for adoption papers in the mail, just in case.” At the horrified look on her face, he winks.

* * *

Richard takes the Batmobile (they actually call it that!) and drops her off near the hotel. She thanks him, stretches herself up to her open window and lets herself in. Nakia’s still asleep, so she slips into the bathroom and changes into her pyjamas. 

When she comes out, Nakia’s standing there tapping her foot. “I woke up a while ago and you were gone! I was worried, dude, where were you?”

“I, uh, I went to talk to Bruno-not- _ not _ -in his room!,” she clarifies. “We met in the hallway and we were just talking about that loser CEO. He was wondering how he knew me as well - that guy was  _ really _ weird.”

Nakia pauses. “The rich are strange people,” she agrees.

Kamala nods, thinking about caves and mansions and little bat ears. “Yup,” she says, popping the ‘p’. She couldn’t agree more if she tried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yahan bhi aa gaye hain ye kamine? - these bastards are here now too?  
> Allah hum sab ko in logon se bachaaye. - God protect us all from these people.  
> jaldi karo - hurry up!  
> naam kya tha uska...- what was his name...  
> aur woh dusra kamina jo Lexcorp chalata hai - that other bastard that runs Lexcorp  
> Bilkul bhi nahi! - Absolutely not!  
> Wallahi - on God
> 
> That's a wrap! This was a monster of a chapter, and it took ages to write but here we are - I hope you enjoyed! I'm being a hundred percent serious when I say that I never thought this would get this much love ;-; it was just a fun little summer project, and now it's a 30K+ multichapter fic! Thank you for all your support.There's an extra bonus scene on the next page, just for y'all. <3 kudos and comments are my everything, hope all of you are safe and doing well! And hey? Thanks. <3


	9. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I lied. I said that was the last chapter, and I lied. Enjoy this bonus scene, as requested by PepperSoniRoni ;)

“ _I’m gonna open a window for you when Cap starts one of his speeches, okay? Be ready_ ,” whispers Ms. Marvel through the ear-piece. Red Robin nods. His limbs are freezing and his teeth won’t stop chattering. He’s been perched on the side of the Avengers Tower in a New York winter for at least two hours now, and he really wishes he’d brought along more chemical hand-warmers. Fifteen simply hadn’t been enough. 

“ _Okay, okay, I’m opening it now!_ ” he hears, the earpiece crackling to life inside his cowl. (Stephanie had made fun of him to no end when he’d told her he was wearing the cowl. “I thought you liked her, dude. Isn’t the idea to romance her, not scare her off?”)

The window next to him creaked open just a bit, and he dropped in soundlessly, hiding in the shadows next to a bookshelf. From where he was standing, he could see Captain America with his headgear off, blond hair giving the back of his head an angelic halo as he talked. “...fought today have been tough, I don’t doubt it. But each of you put the best version of yourself forward, and look what we have accomplished. Our adversaries persist, and the road ahead isn’t going to be easy, but I have no doubt that with our collective will, integrity, and commitment, we can truly win this war against the forces of evil!”

Tim can actually feel the tears forming in his eyes from sheer _hope_ in that speech when he looks up to find a white hologram of a woman staring down at him with a pleasant smile. 

“ _Boss,_ ” she says in a slight Irish lilt, “ _intruder detected. Should I activate the Total Flush Protocol?”_

In his earpiece, Ms. Marvel sighs. “ _You had one job,_ ” she hisses, “ _One. Job._ ”

“An intruder? What class?” says a familiar voice and _oh shit_ , _it’s Tony Stark_ -

Standing above him, glaring at him, all of his 5 10” tech-genius self staring down at him with all the anger his small tech-genius self can muster. 

“A Robin, huh? Actually, Friday, activate the Extreme Prejudice Protocol for me, would ya?”

“ _On it, Boss_.”

Tim is then escorted out of the building by the AI-lady, and when Tim says he was escorted out, he means thrown out with Extreme Prejudice. Out the window, seventy stories off the ground in the middle of December. 

He can hear Ms. Marvel in his earpiece asking “ _What if he dies from the fall? Mr. Stark, you’ve murdered someone!_ ”

_“Relax,_ ” comes the easy reply, while Tim is still _falling,_ by the way, “ _he’s a Bat. He’s gonna pull out some gadget or another and save his life super-easy, just you watch-_ ”

“ _Sensors have detected a grappling hook attached to the west face of the fifty-third floor, Boss._ ”

Yeah, Tim managed to stop himself from becoming a splat on the ground, but now what?

Seeing as she’s still on the line, and he may die anytime, he decides to take a risk. “So, like, does this count as a date?”

“ _What?!_ ” she whisper-shrieks. “ _Gross. You’re the worst, and I’m gonna go hang out with Steph after this_.” then her line disconnects.

“Ms. Marvel. Ms. Marvel?” No response. He sighs. Guess he’ll just hang around for a bit, until she feels guilty and comes back to rescue him. 

Welp, time to bust out the sixteenth hand-warmer.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, that's the end of this fic! A hundred pages on Google Docs...(more than anything I've ever written for school lmao). Thank you so much to everyone who read this fic from start to finish, for all the kudos and comments that kept me going through the summer! I probably wouldn't have gotten to the end without all your encouragement. You guys are the best <3\. 
> 
> I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe, and I wish you all the very best!  
> And hey?  
> Thanks <3.
> 
> p.s. come say hi on [tumblr!](https://lifetimeoflaughter.tumblr.com/)


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